Status on HgBook

[Martin Geisler]

Romain Pelisse <belaran at gmail.com> writes:

> +1
>
> I was already translating the docbook to french when it moved from
> latex to docbook, it was a pain. Moving again to a new format, just
> because the "syntax is ugly"...

It's not just about being ugly, it's also about getting better output
and a better tool-chain... I just tried to compile the book and I was
able to get HTML output. For the PDF, I got funny errors about XSLT
stylesheets not being found and I read something about setting a Java
class path...

In other words: I'm much more comfortable with an Python tool-chain and
produce some good-looking LaTeX code from that instead of relying on the
weird Docbook XML stuff. That is of course because I have lots of
experience with Python and LaTeX, but also because I've yet to see a
good looking book come out of Docbook.

Also, I had the impression that it would be Augie and myself that would
lead the project to rewrite the book, and so I need to have it in a
format that invites me to hack on it :)

>> Using that as a starting point would mean that we don't have to
>> rebuild the whole infrastructure again, we just need to get all the
>> translations migrated to Gettext like the Chinese translation.
>
> I agree. Unless somebody or someone has something better to suggest, I
> also think the first task is to make it more easy to keep tracks of
> the changes through all the translation. (Hence, unless somebody have
> a better idea, moving to gettext should be the next thing to do...)

Yes, that is definitely my plan -- and the Chinese translation has
already shown how to do it.

-- 
Martin Geisler

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