Re: Lout2html

[Aaron Roydhouse]

Bunno> Is there anybody who is planning to make a conversion program
Bunno> from Lout to html ?

That sounds, to me, like a challenging task. I'm not keen on
generating every x->y document translator.  Often these translators,
although sometimes impressive (e.g. latex2html) are unsatisfying and
restricting in various unpleasant ways. Not to mention the effort on
someone's part in writing and maintaining them.

I like to suggest that encoding the content of your documents with
something like SGML and then evolving that content to Lout and HTML
presentation styles would be a better plan.

[warning: rampant evangelism follows]

I am keen on SGML, and want to have good translators for the DOCBOOK
SGML document type (DTD) to LaTeX, HTML, and Lout. I intend to use
HTML browsers or Lout to get to formatted ASCII output. 

Although using SGML without expensive commercial packages is hard work
right now, the potential is there for _huge_ wins. I appreciate the
way SGML documents encode only the content of documents. Although my
translations are primitive at the moment, I'm already authoring only
in SGML. The important thing is that as my translations improve, the
existing SGML documents do not change; Nor should they, the content is
not changing, just the styling and presentation.

SGML allows me to encode all the content information I have, even if
my translators have no idea what to do with it. I wrote documents with
bibliographies before my DOCBOOK->LaTeX translator had any idea what
to do with them. (Obviously it is best to have a translation
implemented by the paper submission date :-)

Lastly SGML->foo translators are a breeze to write, thanks to tools
like Jim Clark's NSGMLS parser and David Megginson's SGMLS perl 5
library. Even better tools are on the horizon. When they come along,
my current documents will be able to take advantage of them.

If you're interested, the info and packages I've looked at are
collected at: http://www.comp.vuw.ac.nz/Technical/SGML/

So my question is, is anyone working on a translation from DOCBOOK to
Lout or HTML?

Aaron.