Replacing Docbook

[John Ralls]

> On Aug 29, 2015, at 5:43 AM, Mike Evans <mikee at saxicola.co.uk> wrote:
> 
> Another random thought then.
> 
> I use asciidoc for pretty much all the docs I write, not much admittedly but it's easy to learn and can produce many output formats.  I just used https://github.com/oreillymedia/docbook2asciidoc to convert the guide to asciidoc using:
> 
> $ java -jar /home/mikee/Projects/docbook2asciidoc/saxon9he.jar -s gnucash-guide.xml -o gnucash-guide.asc /home/mikee/Projects/docbook2asciidoc/d2a.xsl  chunk-output=true
> 
> This produces an asccidoc file for each chapter plus the master page.  Converting this to html using 
> 
> $ asciidoc  gnucash-guide.asc
> 
> produces the entire guide as html, of course many other output formats are possible including docbook.  The only issue is that *none* of the figures are included.  I'm not an expert on XML parsing using .xsl stylesheets but I suspect this could be easily(?) remedied by editing the d2a.xsl to correctly include the figures, as I say I'm no expert here.  Some of the (inevitable) minor formatting issues can be solved manually.
> 
> If solving the figures issue is possible then the documenters would need to learn asciidoc markup.  This is a lot easier than docbook though and since all the files are just plain ascii tracking changes in GIT are straightforward.  The concept of separate files for each chapter is also preserved.
> 
> As I say, just a thought.
> 
> Incidentally LibreOffice can also use multi-file documents/books, but I agree that change tracking is a barrier.

Mike,

Gee, deja-vu: http://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-devel/2013-December/036626.html and following.

Regards,
John Ralls