1997.01.19 Well, I've been chipping away at a DSSSL stylesheet for DocBook since last August, and it's becoming clear that I'm not going to get much further with it until XML is out of the way. The stylesheet made a giant leap forward when Anders Berglund contributed the awesome section that implements CALS tables, but since then I've only gotten a chance to work on this during a couple of long plane flights, and progress in the last two months has been almost zero. So I've decided to call the current version (0.63) an "alpha" and let other people start playing with it. No attempt has been made yet to deal with TOCs (generated or tagged), index entries or references, footnotes, fancy syntax specifications, or callouts and their ilk. There is just enough so that you should be able to use Jade on a DocBook 2.x document and get viewable RTF with no SGML error messages (beyond complaints about the non-SGML characters that I used to hack the bullets and checkboxes). The style is a vanilla demo format based on what used to come out of everyone's cartridge-driven HP LaserJet back when your only choice for titles was Helvetica and your only choices for text were Times and Courier. Any resemblance between this typographical treatment and anyone's actual DocBook templates or FOSIs is, outside of this historical echo, entirely fortuitous. Among the numerous shortcomings of the current stylesheet is the fact that it assumes the Win95 laptop environment that I've been using for testing. If all goes well, by the time I get on a plane again I will have a laptop running Solaris, but I have no idea what I will then use to view or print RTF. Frame is supposed to import RTF but seems to do a wildly buggy job of it. Pointers to Unix applications that do a good job with RTF would be greatly appreciated. The stylesheet can be obtained by anonymous FTP from sunsite.unc.edu in the directory /pub/sun-info/standards/dsssl/stylesheets/docbook. I will be happy to receive suggestions for further improvements, but the fact is that I can already think of a bunch of them that I don't have time to implement. I would be much happier to receive working code that can be added to the stylesheet to make it deal with some of the things that are missing. Same with bugs, of which I'm sure many will be found when this is tried out with existing DocBook collections: I'm interested in hearing about them, but I'll be a lot more interested if you can provide a solution. Bugs in Jade execution should NOT be reported to me but to James Clark (jjc@jclark.com). Always include an actual SGML file that demonstrates the problem together with the stylesheet, the corresponding RTF output, and a text description when you send a Jade bug report to James. If you need information about Jade, read http://www.jclark.com/Jade and check out the other materials in ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/sun-info/standards/dsssl/. Right now there are virtually no tutorial materials on DSSSL, just the standard (a DynaText 2.3 electronic copy of the committee draft for Windows is in /pub/sun-info/standards/dsssl/draft) and the existing example stylesheets, so if you're going to try working with this, bring a sturdy ax and don't forget the water purification tablets. Recommended reading: R. Kent Dybvig, The Scheme Programming Language, Second Edition (Prentice Hall, 1996, ISBN 0-13-454-646-6). Jon ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Jon Bosak, Online Information Technology Architect, Sun Microsystems ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 2550 Garcia Ave., MPK17-101, | Best is he that inuents, Mountain View, California 94043 | the next he that followes Davenport Group::SGML Open::ANSI X3V1 | forth and eekes out a good ::ISO/IEC JTC1/SC18/WG8::W3C SGML ERB | inuention. ----------------------------------------------------------------------