Re: sidebar in docbook

[Aharon Robbins]

Thanks Patrice.

I will try out some of those things just to see how they work. I
would like to hear Karl's response to my other reply also.

There is a larger question waiting to be asked, which is how far towards
docbook are we willing to drag texinfo?

For example, docbook has explicit markup for prefaces, forewords, and
dedications. I have one of each in the gawk manual, which I have marked
up using physical markup (@unnumbered etc.), but I would just as soon
have the real thing:

        @node Dedication
        @dedication
        ....

        @node Foreword
        @foreword Foreword to the First Edition
        ....

        @node Preface
        @preface
        ....

These might be easy to do with existing facilities, I haven't tried,
but it'd be best if makeinfo knew about them to generate the right
docbook tags, as well as the right HTML and Info.

As far as I know, the gawk manual is the only texinfo book to be converted
to docbook and published by a "real" publisher.  That was over 10 years
ago, but I have hopes that it may happen again, so anything that makes
that easier is better for me.  :-)

Also, I really like the idea of semantic markup, and providing these
things for authors, is IMHO, a Good Thing.

And, whether or not we like it, DocBook is something of the prevailing
standard for machine-processable documentation; e.g. the LinuxDoc project
uses it, I think.  (That Eric Raymond just drools over DocBook might
be considered a bug, on the other hand. :-)

I still need to brain dump some more thoughts about texinfo -> docbook,
but that's not urgent.

Thanks!

Arnold

P.S. Just to be clear. I happen to think Texinfo is the best markup
language I've ever used.  But as someone who has written a large
number of books in DocBook, I do appreciate its power and expressability,
if not its verbosity.  And thus my pushing to bring Texinfo up to the
same level of expressability as DocBook - both because it makes Texinfo
a better markup language (IMHO, of course), and because it makes the
transition to DocBook, when needed, more straightforward and less manual.
(I can take credit for suggesting a few features like this already, e.g.
@option and @multitable. :-)