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gnat (29)
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Monday
Didn't, however, get any Cookbook work done. I was settling in after putting William to bed, and Raley started howling. She'd been rubbing her ear for the last few days, but it must finally have turned into a full blown ear infection. Hence, no sleep for us last night, and no Cookbook updates.
Have I plugged AudioHijack enough yet? I've got a great collection of BBC docos so far, and I'm loving it. I'm using their beta of v2, which supports saving directly as mp3. This is super sweet.
I found DocBook-X, a strange little combination of tools to emit PDF from DocBook source. In theory, we at O'Reilly are supposed to have such a beast, but like all our computer systems, it's a nightmare to get running anywhere but on the machine that was developed on. Well, to give them credit, the new FrameMaker/XML conversion tool was relatively easy to get working on Mac OS X, I just couldn't do anything with the XML or Frame once I had it!
Currently listening to Mark O'Connor's "In Full Swing", a very nice swing jazz album. O'Connor is a phenomenal talent, and it's good to hear something that's not classical. He's been on one of those "I'm a serious musician" jags, and it's sucked to have him release album after album of boring music.
--Nat
--Larry Wall in stab.c from the perl source code
DocBook-X (Score:2)
What an utter piece of crap.
This package is the worst of what open source is about. This is a 16MB download of poorly documented and highly buggy software. Thankfully, it's mostly shell scripts, but completely untested shell scripts (docbook-sh.cfg is a slightly warmed over csh shell script that doesn't work; multiple bugs in docbook2pdf took a while to spot before it led to a few hundred lines of Java exceptio
Re:DocBook-X (Score:1)
Agreed -- I also wasted time trying to get the broken
shscript to work, only to be rewarded by the ubiquitous Java stack trace. I must admit that I've never seen the draw of Java + XML, though.Re:DocBook-X (Score:2)
Re:DocBook-X (Score:2)
Java + XML quite simply doesn't fly. You can do it for sure, but it really wasn't made to handle XML's flexibility gracefully. To be honest, the worst part of going from a Perl job to a job in which I occasionally do some Java is the XML support. No good SAX writer, no good parsing framework (JAXP is pretty much a joke), no trace of a proper SAX pipelining framework, no viable XPath on streams, no variety in tree implementations. It's appalling.
Only two languages have proper XML support, Perl and P
-- Robin Berjon [berjon.com]
Re:DocBook-X (Score:2)
So if this is the worst of open source and DocBook, where are the good DocBook tools for OS X?
--Nat
Re:DocBook-X (Score:2)
This was the worst of open source: a big download that wasn't debugged, was poorly documented, and didn't work.
The "good docbook tools for OS X" that I use are the same ones I've been using for years on Linux, FreeBSD and Win*: xsltproc (from libxslt), DocBook-XSLT, openjade, DocBook-DSSSL, and the XML/SGML DTDs. Converting DocBook to PDF directly has always been tricky, and the best paths involve using TeX
Re:DocBook-X (Score:1)
And those characteristics differ from a release 1.0 from MicroSoft (any product) in what way?
Oh, I get it - for open source, this is the worst possible, rather than the standard.
Re:DocBook-X (Score:2)
Bah, who cares if DocBook has tools? Even with the best tools it's still the Ugliest XML Vocabulary Ever (ducks)!.
-- Robin Berjon [berjon.com]