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.