gnome-db2html3

[John Fleck <jfleck inkstain net>]

Folks -

We now have a working, albeit rudimentary, xml/sgml->html converter in
GNOME cvs available for your testing.

It's called gnome-db2html3, and it will be the eventual replacement
for gnome-db2htl2 in Nautilus.

Features:
* uses libxml2 and libxslt
* uses a customization layer on top of Normal Walsh's DocBook
  stylesheets
* supports full DocBook, rather than the subset we have been limited
  to with gnome-db2html2
* supports both sgml and xml DocBook (many thinks to Daniel Veillard
  for this)
* supports catalogs for DTD resolution (more thanks to DV)

Todo:
* support chunking (we currently generate a single html page for the
  entire document - this will change to a toc followed by individual
  pages for each chapter/sect1/etc, as with the current systems)
* support caching, to reduce the number of times files must be parsed
  and thereby improve performance

There are two options if you would like to build and test this - a
full Nautilus build or building gnome-db2html3 as a stand-alone
command line tool.

gnome-db2html3 is now commented out of the Nautilus build by
default. To enable it, go to configure.in in the Nautilus root and
uncomment the line:

#BUILD_GNOME_DB2HTML3=yes

Do the standard autogen.sh.

Then you can:

a) build Nautilus using the standard make, make install. The resulting
Nautilus build will use gnome-db2html3 to translate help files to html.

b) go to components/help/converters/gnome-db2html3/ and do a make,
make install there. This will leave your existing Nautilus
untrammeled, while installing gnome-db2html3 and the associated
stylesheets so it can be used as a command line tool.

To generate html with it, to see how it looks:

gnome-db2html3 filename.sgml > ~/filename.html

You will need the latest libxml2 and libxslt to build this. You can
get them from:

ftp://xmlsoft.org/

The usual caveats apply: this is probably broken in many new and
interesting ways, it's very alpha, but it needs people to try it out
or we won't find bugs and fix 'em.

Bugs are worth discussing here, but they also should be filed in the
Nautilus bugzilla, else we lose track of them:
http://bugzilla.eazel.com

Many thanks also to Laszlo Kovacs for his assistance in helping me
figure out how to do this.

Cheers ,
John
-- 
John Fleck
jfleck inkstain net (h), http://www.inkstain.net/fleck/
--
"A day you don't go to jail is a good day." - scrap