Docbook Vs. Other Formats for Gnucash Documents

[Christian Stimming]

Am Mittwoch, 24. September 2008 04:21 schrieb Tom Browder:
> I've once more looked at docbook and all its promises, but see no
> significant progress with free tools to convert it to other than html.
>  Not only that, docbook-xml isn't even guaranteed to ever be powerful
> enough to produce beautiful documents using all the power of TeX (see
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XSL_Formatting_Objects#Drawbacks_of_XSL-FO>).

I'm not so sure whether we should "TeX" as the measure here. Nevertheless I'd 
wholeheartly agee that docbook-xml has its drawbacks as well. Some of them 
were promised to go away over time but haven't, others are just a minor 
nuisance.

> I would like to hear any thoughts about changing from docbook-xml to
> another format with currently available tools that can produce html as
> well as pdf (I'm considering ConTeXt for one; see
> <http://www.pragma-ade.com>).

In principle there isn't any strong reason to stick with docbook-xml so far. 
Hence, anyone who is willing to do the migration work can propose and 
implement a migration to another format or text markup language, if desired. 
However, one should be really sure that the benefits of the newly chosen 
format outweigh its drawbacks when compared to the existing format. In other 
words, if you think another format is better suited for this usage, you 
should give us a convincing argument why this is the case and why its 
benefits outweigh the "But I'm used to docbook-xml" argument.

For example, one persisting drawback of docbook-xml format seems to be that 
it's hard for people to find a good text editor that hides the formatting 
tags from them. People said openoffice were able to edit docbook-xml 
directly, but I haven't seen this in action and somehow this isn't what 
potential new contributors discover at first. It would be good if a new 
format has an easier accessible way of editing the text... I'm afraid ConTeXt 
wouldn't be a good choice for that, but I'm ready to be proven otherwise.

Some time ago, people asked whether the help/guide couldn't be made available 
for editing in our wiki. This boils down to the question whether there is a 
good wiki-to-static-html converter (and in the same course also to PDF) 
available for some wiki systems out there. Unfortunately, during my research 
of that topic last summer there wasn't any such solution available, at least 
for the stock MediaWiki we're using so far. In the meantime and in another 
MediaWiki I've found the extension "Pdf_Book", 
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Pdf_Book , which can at least produce 
a PDF from a set of wiki pages, but the result is butt ugly and some 
important formatting elements are still missing. Additionaly there were 
http://toolserver.org/~magnus/wiki2xml/w2x.php and 
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Wiki2LaTeX , but at the time both 
produced even worse result. This may have changed, though. From browsing that 
website I also see http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:DumpHTML but I 
haven't investigated this in detail.

In my opinion, if we move the help and guide to a new text format anyway, a 
wiki format would be much preferrable to any other still static text format.

However, the decision is with him who makes the work. So, if you can give a 
good reason for another choice, explain it to us and we will probably agree.

Regards,

Christian