Python documentation in DocBook

[Michele Simionato]

Michael Hudson <mwh at python.net> wrote in message news:<7h3fzu4z9ww.fsf at pc150.maths.bris.ac.uk>...
> martin at v.loewis.de (Martin v. Loewis) writes:
> 
> > DaveP <DaveP at NEARLYdpawson.freeserve.co.uk> writes:
>  [...]
> > > My wild guess would be that there are today more people familiar with XML
> > > than there are with \tex.
> 
> I doubt this.  Many, many scientists know tex, or rather latex.
> 
> Among the people who are likely to contribute to Python's docs, you
> may well be right, though I'm not sure what "being familiar with XML"
> *means* here -- being familiar with an appropriate XML application
> like docbook is surely the point, and that cuts the number of people
> down again.
> 
> > > How long will the supply of tex afficianado's last?
> 
> Long enough, I'd bet.
> 
> > You don't need to be a Tex aficionado to contribute to the Python
> > documentation. I don't like Tex myself, and I don't use it for
> > anything but the Python documentation. However, when writing Python
> > documentation, I don't think of it as writing Tex. It is a special
> > language that is much easier to learn than Tex, since the processor is
> > much more forgiving (it is processed by Fred Drake, after all).
> 
> My pedantic streak is wanting to point out the differences between
> "Tex", "plain Tex" and "LaTex" (the last of which being what Python's
> docs are in), but I doubt anyone cares...
> 
> Cheers,
> M.

I have used latex for scientific publications in the last nine years and I
am very happy with it. Nevertheless, using latex to write documentation
would make me very unhappy. I fill that in a text with no mathematical
formulas latex is overkill. I have great hope for the docutils project
and reStructuredText as a substitute of latex. Then, I don't think it
would be difficult to convert reStructuredText to XML.By the way, even 
now there are latex2XML converters (I don't know how much reliable).

--
Michele Simionato - Dept. of Physics and Astronomy
210 Allen Hall Pittsburgh PA 15260 U.S.A.
Phone: 001-412-624-9041 Fax: 001-412-624-9163
Home-page: http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~micheles/