96 email messages sent. Dealt with several that were long outstanding. There are now only four messages in my inbox that are before the 20th of January, and those are book messages that require Other People to decide things before I can reply. Yay!
Didn't, however, get any Cookbook work done. I was settling in after putting William to bed, and Raley started howling. She'd been rubbing her ear for the last few days, but it must finally have turned into a full blown ear infection. Hence, no sleep for us last night, and no Cookbook updates.
Have I plugged AudioHijack enough yet? I've got a great collection of BBC docos so far, and I'm loving it. I'm using their beta of v2, which supports saving directly as mp3. This is super sweet.
I found DocBook-X, a strange little combination of tools to emit PDF from DocBook source. In theory, we at O'Reilly are supposed to have such a beast, but like all our computer systems, it's a nightmare to get running anywhere but on the machine that was developed on. Well, to give them credit, the new FrameMaker/XML conversion tool was relatively easy to get working on Mac OS X, I just couldn't do anything with the XML or Frame once I had it!
Currently listening to Mark O'Connor's "In Full Swing", a very nice swing jazz album. O'Connor is a phenomenal talent, and it's good to hear something that's not classical. He's been on one of those "I'm a serious musician" jags, and it's sucked to have him release album after album of boring music.
--Nat
What an utter piece of crap.I found DocBook-X, a strange little combination of tools to emit PDF from DocBook source.
This package is the worst of what open source is about. This is a 16MB download of poorly documented and highly buggy software. Thankfully, it's mostly shell scripts, but completely untested shell scripts (docbook-sh.cfg is a slightly warmed over csh shell script that doesn't work; multiple bugs in docbook2pdf took a while to spot before it led to a few hundred lines of Java exceptions...).
Sure, it's a very early release, but I can't see how it works at Project Omega, let alone anywhere else. From what I can tell, it suffers from the same poor engineering that the DocBook tools at O'Reilly do (the ones that only run on the development machine). Most of the download are very large JAR files that don't need to change very much between releases, so I'm unlikely to upgrade this to see if they do manage to apply the patches I send their way. And finally, this package is installed in a rather strange area of a Mac OS X system:
This irks me so much because it lends credence to the widely held myths that "DocBook is Hard!", "DocBook has no tools!" and "DocBook doesn't work (dammit)!". This is certainly not the case; I've set up DocBook processing configurations on dozens of machines over the past 5 years.
</rant>
Re:DocBook-X
chromatic on 2003-01-29T08:24:02
Agreed -- I also wasted time trying to get the broken
shscript to work, only to be rewarded by the ubiquitous Java stack trace. I must admit that I've never seen the draw of Java + XML, though.Re:DocBook-X
ziggy on 2003-01-29T13:58:08
Then you must not remember Scott McNealy's pronouncement of ca. 1999: «XML gives Java something to do!»I must admit that I've never seen the draw of Java + XML, though.:-) Re:DocBook-X
darobin on 2003-01-30T13:41:43
Java + XML quite simply doesn't fly. You can do it for sure, but it really wasn't made to handle XML's flexibility gracefully. To be honest, the worst part of going from a Perl job to a job in which I occasionally do some Java is the XML support. No good SAX writer, no good parsing framework (JAXP is pretty much a joke), no trace of a proper SAX pipelining framework, no viable XPath on streams, no variety in tree implementations. It's appalling.
Only two languages have proper XML support, Perl and Python. The latter probably more unfortunately, but then it's hard to find good Perl hackers to work on XML modules. Any many of them will tell you they won't have anything to do with it because "it's a Java thing". Sigh. EORANT.
Re:DocBook-X
gnat on 2003-01-29T17:31:53
How weird, it worked out of the box for me. I even wrote a crude translator for Project Gutenberg books to turn them into DocBook articles and successfully translated a couple.So if this is the worst of open source and DocBook, where are the good DocBook tools for OS X?
--Nat
Re:DocBook-X
ziggy on 2003-01-29T17:49:15
This was the worst of open source: a big download that wasn't debugged, was poorly documented, and didn't work.So if this is the worst of open source and DocBook, where are the good DocBook tools for OS X?The "good docbook tools for OS X" that I use are the same ones I've been using for years on Linux, FreeBSD and Win*: xsltproc (from libxslt), DocBook-XSLT, openjade, DocBook-DSSSL, and the XML/SGML DTDs. Converting DocBook to PDF directly has always been tricky, and the best paths involve using TeX. FOP has been around for a while now, and is generally known to be buggy and not supporting a lot of the XSL-FO recommendation. (PassiveTex isn't perfect, but it is much closer for what it claims to cover.) There's supposed to be a big rewrite in progress that incorporates jfor (FO->RTF), supports more (all?) of the XSL-FO recommendation, and might support more inputs (SVG) and outputs (SVG, PS, etc.).
As for OS X support, all of this can be installed via fink. (PassiveTex is a little trickier, and may not be directly supported with a fink package...)
Re:DocBook-X
jmm on 2003-01-30T18:29:27
This was the worst of open source: a big download that wasn't debugged, was poorly documented, and didn't work.And those characteristics differ from a release 1.0 from MicroSoft (any product) in what way?
Oh, I get it - for open source, this is the worst possible, rather than the standard.
Re:DocBook-X
darobin on 2003-01-30T13:36:54
Bah, who cares if DocBook has tools? Even with the best tools it's still the Ugliest XML Vocabulary Ever (ducks)!.
