Re: Can extension build own SGML document?

On 9/15/15 8:43 AM, Tom Lane wrote:
> Jim Nasby <Jim(dot)Nasby(at)BlueTreble(dot)com> writes:
>> I'm not sure SGML is the way to go anymore anyways. Asciidoc offers a
>> lot of what our SGML does in a much easier to support toolchain. It's
>> also natively supported by github, which makes it nice for others to
>> view the output (see [1] as an exmaple). If asciidoc isn't powerful
>> enough for what you need you can switch to asciidoctor which is even
>> more powerful[2].
>
> AFAICT from a quick look at its documentation, asciidoc can produce
> either html or docbook output; so as soon as you want something other
> than html output (in particular, PDF), you're back to relying on the
> exact same creaky docbook toolchain we use now. Only with one extra
> dependency in front of it.
>
> Personally I never look at anything but the HTML rendering, but I doubt
> that dropping support for all other output formats would fly :-(
>
> I do agree that the SGML toolchain is getting pretty long in the tooth
> and we need to be looking for something else.

I wasn't thinking of trying to replace the Postgres toolchain, but...

a2x (http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/a2x.1.html) states that it can
generate "PDF, EPUB, DVI, PS, LaTeX, XHTML (single page or chunked), man
page, HTML Help or plain text formats using asciidoc(1) and other
applications (see REQUISITES section). SOURCE_FILE can also be a DocBook
file with an .xml extension."

What I expect would be a lot more effort is actually converting all the
SGML to asciidoc. A quick google search doesn't turn up anything promising.

If the only bad part of our current toolchain is PDF then perhaps we
should just rethink how that's being generated. Since a2x can take
docbook input maybe that's the way to go. But my understanding was that
we've modified docbook and that's where part of the pain is coming from?
In that case a full-out migration to asciidoc might be better.
--
Jim Nasby, Data Architect, Blue Treble Consulting, Austin TX
Experts in Analytics, Data Architecture and PostgreSQL
Data in Trouble? Get it in Treble! http://BlueTreble.com