http://tecfa.unige.ch/guides/xml/frame-sgml/sdocbook/

Scroll down please and read the text at the end.

Name	Last modified	Size

Parent Directory		-
xml-icon.gif	2001-03-20 14:28	667
sgmlapps.fm	2001-03-19 19:51	31K
sdocbook.rules	2001-04-17 20:58	1.4K
sdocbook.dtd	2001-03-16 17:15	44K
sdocbook.dcl	2001-03-16 17:16	2.4K
sdocbook-test.xml	2001-04-19 12:58	16K
sdocbook-test.pdf	2001-04-19 12:57	94K
sdocbook-test.fm	2001-04-19 18:12	155K
sdocbook-test.css	2001-04-19 12:58	6.5K
sdocbook-test-TAGS.pdf	2001-03-22 23:37	66K
sdocbook-test-2.gif	2001-04-17 19:56	2.0K
sdocbook-template.xml	2001-03-21 22:45	779
mysdocbook.dtd	2001-04-19 17:41	39K
mysdocbook.diff	2001-03-19 10:51	6.3K
mysdocbook-edd.pdf	2001-05-26 19:37	962K
mysdocbook-edd.fm	2001-10-04 21:56	551K
mysdocbook-edd-bare.fm	2001-03-19 15:26	397K
imagedata1.gif	2001-04-19 12:58	8.1K
README.html	2001-05-26 23:20	3.7K
HEADER.html	2001-03-22 23:41	114

MY "Simplified" DocBook XML DTD for FrameMaker + SGML

Part of my let's struggle with "FrameMaker+SGML 6" and XML series. IMPORTANT if you are new to the topic you really should read my little "XML with FrameMaker + SGML Quick Guide" (or better if you can find anything): PDF or html.

This is an unfinished project started on March 19 2001. Trying to import Norman Walsh's Simplified Docbook XML DTD into FrameMaker + SGML 6. See http://www.nwalsh.com/docbook/simple/index.html.

Importing the sdocbook.dtd almost works. Framemaker doesn't read unicode, therefore all character entity declarations will fail. This concerns:

sdbcent.mod and files in the ent/ directory

Since I am no FrameMaker or SGML expert I don't know how to fix this. Maybe read/write rules could do the trick. I did not spend more than 10 minutes on the problem, but just ripped out the lines you can see in the mysdocbook.diff file. Fixing this is not a #1 priority, since Frame generates something that does look like correct entities (needs verification, fact that Mozilla shows it is not enough).

Summary:

You can import mysdocbook.dtd into FrameMaker + SGML. The result will be something like mysdocbook-edd-bare.fm Don't forget to change "Valid as highest-level element" from title to article !
mysdocbook-edd.fm has also formatting rules. Sort of a feasability test if you like. WARNING: So this EDD isn't really complete. Will do better when/if I decide to use this DTD for real. Writing EDD rules is really rough work if you do it just casually. It's not my idea of fun. Anyhow I actually did write a text (on which I will improve until the end of summer 2001): http://tecfa.unige.ch/tecfa/talks/schneide/tie-talk01/internet-uni01.pdf. My major struggle were figures, can't have them floating and have a DTD conformant title element :(
An example file is: sdocbook-test.fm. Generated xml is sdocbook-test.xml. Note that the output (on march 21) is almost valid. Only imagedata has wrong attributes, and another attribute (cols) is missing from tgroup. Both problems could be fixed with xslt post-processing, but maybe I should try to generate correct XML from the start with r/w rules. The CSS stylesheet has not been adapted for real use yet (and maybe never will, at least before I see some CSS2 capable browsers). You can grasp some contents from Mozilla or maybe even IE explorer.
XSLT->XHTML stylesheet: Should do this next.
Note: No plans for XSL/FO since the point of using FrameMaker is precisely that it can do PDF (and PS) natively and quite well so. Look at the *.pdf files for sdocbook-test.

Final note: If you try to include the full XML Docbook DTD, FrameMaker + SGML 6 will crash on both Solaris and Windows 2000 (at least the versions I have). Don't http://docbook.org/xml/ or tell me how :)

Last modified: Sat May 26 23:20:09 MEST 2001

D.K.S.