Re: yodl and Z shell documentation (was localtraps)

[Oliver Kiddle <okiddle@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Bart wrote:

> This is not increasing my enthusiasm.  The whole reason we chose yodl
> way back when was because that meant *one* piece of format-conversion
> software was required to produce all the output formats we wanted.

If you consider that we currently need texi2html to produce HTML and
pdfetex to produce PDF (no to mention a full TeX installation), the
current situation doesn't quite live up to that. 

> Requiring a greater number of conversion tools from a wider variety of 
> sources and that may be available on a smaller number of target OSs, is
> not a step forward in my opinion.

Well docbook would be a single source and XSL-FO our only intermediate
source. Docbook as a format is largely independent of the actual tools.
There's a defacto standard set of XSL stylesheets for producing HTML,
man, plain text (I think) and XSL-FO. But you've got a choice of XSL
translator (xsltproc, saxon, xalan etc). For PDFs there's again a choice
for converting XSL-FO (fop (java), PassiveTex and xmlroff). So as far as
target OSs go, we'd be in a far better position than with yodl.

If we do go through with the transition, you'll probably find the main
disadvantage is that docbook source and XML is somewhat more verbose
than yodl.

Oliver