more defined process

[Karsten Wade]

On Sat, 2004-08-14 at 14:39, Mark Johnson wrote:
> Tammy Fox wrote:
> 
> > Mark, since this is your idea, please share some more details about what
> > you have in mind. How is it different from the existing guide? 
> 
> It would be a very brief tutorial on how to configure emacs for 
> user-friendly DocBook XML editing. Naturally, I'd recommend that new 
> users make use of my psgmlx[1] package for the psgml setup. [May 
> have to do some tweaking to the package to provide the right stuff 
> in the "Insert DTD" menu. I'll look inot this. Karsten & I are 
> putting the package on Savannah 'real soon now'.]
> 
> 
> > What problem does it solve?
> 
> Setting up emacsp/sgml, effectively, w/o having to do any setup. 
> Truly a quick start to setting up a DocBook authoring environment in 
> emacs. It's different from what's in the Docs guide in that psgmlx 
> does all the setup for you, and provides sgml/xml-mode color themes 
> as well. Put simply, it's aimed at newbie emacs users.
> 

IMO, we should continue to focus on smaller, modular <articles>. 
Internally at Red Hat, I push for all processes and how-to material for
the Engineering Docs team to be in the one Doc Guide.  However, we don't
want the Fedora docs project Doc Guide to become a massive tome.  This
is just an extension of the argument that we don't want too grow our
document set by making bigger books until we have a solid, experienced
team.  Working on smaller books that snap together is much more feasible
and scalable.

For that reason, I'd suggest Mark do his doc as a stand-alone.  It will
be easy enough to convert it to a <chapter> and include it in the Doc
Guide when we are ready to support even just that one guide more
completely.

Oh, FWIW, psgmlx works really well.  I don't use the right-click insert
element, or many of the other fancy mouse tricks that Mark included and
that are perfect for new users.  What I love is that the _awesome_ psgml
keybindings are available for XML.  I understand that nXML is probably
the way of the future (considering James Clark is behind it), but for
now psgmlx has a better feature set, IMHO. 

- Karsten

> [1] http://dulug.duke.edu/~mark/psgmlx

-- 
Karsten Wade, RHCE, Tech Writer
a lemon is just a melon in disguise
http://people.redhat.com/kwade/
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