Re: Newbie volunteer -- need some directions and help

From: Randy Kramer (rhkramer@fast.net)
Date: Sun Apr 14 2002 - 09:20:26 EDT

  • Next message: Randy Kramer: "Re: Newbie volunteer -- need some directions and help"

    Roshan Mathews wrote:
    > : Other things that might help (but I have not
    > : managed to become a developer (so far?), so take
    > : these with a grain of salt) would be to dig into
    > : things like Doxygen (and maybe Bonsai?).
    >
    > I can't stay online for very long here (too expensive)
    > so browsing the source online is out of the question.
    > :) Any other suggestions?

    It sounds like Alan is getting you the source code somehow. IIUC, it is
    possible to set up Doxygen locally, in fact I think I have it locally
    (on my Linux box). Don't remember what I had to do -- maybe I got it
    when I downloaded the code from CVS, so maybe you'll get it from Alan.
    If you don't get it from Alan, let me know, I'll try to figure out how I
    got it. (Maybe it says on one of the AbiWord web pages.)

    On another note, discussion is going on over at the LDP project about
    getting DocBook support in open source tools and word processors. I was
    about to write back and tell them that AbiWord has some support, and
    some of the developers seem to be somewhat interested in improving it.
    So, I copy that note below.

    I know you are only beginning your effort at becoming an AbiWord
    developer, but other developers may be interested in this effort as
    well, so it may be helpful to establish a liason with the LDP, perhaps
    through jdd. Accordingly, I am copying this to jdd and the LDP. You
    may wish to subscribe to the docbook@linuxdoc.org list.

    Note that in a followup post, David Merrill expresses doubt that any
    word processor project would want to handle the metadata that the LDP
    maintains for each document. I think that should be treated as an open
    question -- note that Word does allow inclusion of metadata for each
    document, including some amount of customization. (If you have Word97,
    go to File --> Properties, and then check all the tabs including
    Custom. I presume that more recent versions of Word have something
    similar.)

    <quote>
    Subject:
           OpenOffice.org
       Date:
           Sun, 14 Apr 2002 08:29:24 +0200
      From:
           jdd <jdanield@dodin.net>
        To:
           discuss@linuxdoc.org

    Dear fellows,

    I have the great chance to have Guylhem Aznar as a friend and he agrees
    with me to the following.

    As you may know, the main technical problem for the LDP is the lack of a
    free, open source, widely spread text processor able to give a valid
    docbook/xml formatted document.

    authors using rarely this format -as I do- are very uncomfortable with
    emacs/vi use for that sake.

    At the same time a great project, namly OpenOffice.org
    (www.openoffice.org), the open source side of sun's Star Office is to
    release it's Version 1 and use an XML format.

    this format is as so:

    the file is no more than a zip file. If you unzip it with any archiver,
    you see a tree like this:

    root
    --/xml
    --/images
    --/equations
    --/(... any kind of object)

    the texte part is xml, DTD defined. each object format is in it's own
    directory and it's own format, for example images in jpg.

    this format is of course competely open, beeing DTD defined.

    It is so very near from docbook/xml.

    So It's possible to make scripts to convert such files in any kind of
    ldp compliant format.

    in addition, OOo is able to read and so convert most of the know text
    processors formats.

    I will do three proposals:

    1) accept as an experimental process some documents in OOo format in the
    ldp document base,

    2) open contact with OOo developpers to ask them to add a "docbook"
    export to OOo programm.

    3) contact other similar project (debian doc, koffice developpers) with
    the same goal.

    I already begin the point 2 and let you know of any answer.

    of course this doesn't exclude any of the previous docbook processing
    tools for peoples familiar with them, but I think we are still loosing a
    great part of the documentation for lack of friendly text processing
    capability, hence this proposal.

    jdd
    </quote>



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Sun Apr 14 2002 - 09:28:26 EDT