Re: DAVENPORT: source code in docbook

[Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>]

/ Eric Promislow <emp@omnimark.com> was heard to say:
|   Brian Travis has written two books, one on SGML and one on OmniMark,
| with automatically generated, correct examples.  His markup contains
| complete input texts and programs, with a command to run an OmniMark
| program to produce the desired output.  Markup inside the samples
| dictates which parts of the code should appear in print, which should
| be mapped to an ellipsis, and which should be discarded altogether.
| 
|   I don't know if docbook has tags that would support this approach.
| But it would work in an XML system, given an appropriate tag set.

A system like this was what I alluded to when I mentioned a
'literate programming style'. It can be done, and omnimark is a
fine tool to do it with (though I'd probably hack it up in Perl
myself).

Since DocBook allows most inline elements in the various
codelisting environments, I'm sure you could get it to work with
DocBook markup.

But it's very fragile in the sense that the author writing the
documentation has to know a fair amount about the code or their
likely to mangle it.

                                        Cheers,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>      | I plead contemporary insanity.
http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/ | 
Member, DocBook Editorial Board    |