Re: DOCBOOK-APPS: Help please: new user questions

[Markus Hoenicka <hoenicka_markus at compuserve dot com>]

Hi James,

James Buchanan writes:
 > I can't be sure, because I am uncertain of whether anything else will
 > be useful for me. If I can produce academic articles, essays, books
 > and reports such as dissertations, which I can with the DocBook
 > classes, and then translate into HTML/XHTML, PDF, Postscript, RTF and
 > plain text, then this is all I will need for my purposes.

This will all be supported.

 > The main thing is this: the installer should get everything setup for
 > the user who has no idea about DTDs and stuff, as I don't. My aim is
 > to use DocBook as is, and for this, I will need the pocessors like
 > OpenJade to know how to find the DocBook files, so I can go C:\DocBook
 > Documents\Articles\> openjade whatever.sgm -t tex -o whatever.tex and
 > it will work without extra help from me to find the catalog files and
 > such.
 > 
The packages will be designed to fall into place and just work. This
is a lot simpler with a (FHS-compliant) Cygwin filesystem than with
the non-structured Windows filesystem. Jon ported the Debian catalog
tool so all DTDs and stylesheets that rely on SGML catalogs will work
automatically after installation. XML catalogs will be supported as
well.

 > This installer should give the option not to install the TeX things,
 > as I already have the TeX Live! bundle and I don't want its
 > environment variables messed up pointing off to other TeX distros.
 > 

There are no dependencies that require Cygwin TeX. You will of course
be on your own in terms of installing JadeTeX et al, including setting
the memory requirements in texmf.cnf. At work I use Cygwin with fpTeX,
just for the heck of it.

 > And so, here is what I am looking for:
 > * Installer to install and setup correctly, ready to translate DocBook
 > markup into several formats
 > * Latest DocBook DTDs etc, and docs for upgrading (e.g. download blah
 > and install to blah)

DTDs and stylesheets will be available as packages, so upgrading is
a pointy-clicky thing.

 > This wasn't helpful to me at all. It just confused me because it
 > didn't explain what the source of my error messages might be. I have
 > the software it talks about, and followed the instructions for setting
 > up and using each software package as far as was explained in their
 > respective documentation packages, but I still can't use DocBook.

I'm afraid the instructions weren't helpful because you didn't follow
them.

 > 
 > openjade:C:\Docbook\docbook-4.1\dbcent.mod:54:0:E: cannot open
 > "C:\Docbook\docbook-4.1\iso-amsa.gml" (No such file or directory)

This means that you got the catalog entries for these entities
wrong. The section "Install the ISO entity sets" explains that you
have to fix the paths and the filenames in docbook.cat.


 > openjade:test.sgm:14:0:E: character data is not allowed here
 > openjade:C:\Docbook\docbook-4.1\docbook.cat:22:0:W: DTDDECL catalog
 > entries are not supported
 > openjade:E: cannot open "-t" (No such file or directory)
 > openjade:E: cannot open "test.dsl" (No such file or directory)
 > openjade:E: cannot open "tex" (No such file or directory)
 > openjade:E: specification document does not have the DSSSL
 > architecture as a base architecture
 > openjade:E: cannot open "-o" (No such file or directory)
 > openjade:E: cannot open "test.tex" (No such file or directory)

These errors stem from the way you invoke openjade. According to your
mail you try:

openjade whatever.sgm -t tex -o whatever.tex

but the instructions in the section "The first steps with DocBook"
tell you to run:

openjade -t rtf -d \path\to\print\docbook.dsl \path\to\docbook.dcl docbook.sgml

which admittedly is a difference.

The technical background of your problem is that openjade does not use
the getopts library to parse the command line. It uses stricter rules
on the placement of options and arguments. It reads the command line
from left to right, using all options it can find, until it hits the
first non-option token, i.e. a string that does not start with a
dash. This is used as the first filename. All following tokens are
assumed to be filenames as well, and openjade simply tries to
concatenate these files. Your first token on the command line is the
SGML filename, so it will never read the options and thus has no
chance to find tidbits like the stylesheet or a declaration.

Using options and filenames in the sequence given in the tutorial
should fix this problem.

regards,
Markus
-- 
Markus Hoenicka
hoenicka_markus@compuserve.com
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/hoenicka_markus/