From: Peter Eisentraut <peter_e@gmx.net>
To: Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@surnet.cl>
Subject: Re: process hangs when converting sgml documentation to PDF
Date: Tue, 7 Jun 2005 19:57:16 +0200
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Alvaro Herrera wrote:
> Excellent :-(  How about we discuss again whether to move to XML?

You can already use "XML" today.  Go to doc/src/sgml and type "make 
testxml" and you'll get HTML documentation built using XSLT 
stylesheets.

The bad news, however, is that using the XSLT toolchain the state of the 
print-output-generating tools is even worse.  FOP crashes left and 
right, PassiveTeX is unmaintained and incredibly hard to set up, and 
the rest costs big cash.  In fact, the only reason the DSSSL toolchain 
is still barely maintained is to generate print output.

> AFAIR the problem was that there wasn't a way to include certain
> parts of the documentation depending on whether some symbol was
> defined or not.  Is that still true?  Furthermore, do we use that
> feature and how, and is there a way to work around the problem?

The way around that would be to use the profiling feature of the XSLT 
stylesheets.  But the way it's set up right now, storing the files in 
SGML and converting them to XML on the fly, works out just as well.

-- 
Peter Eisentraut
http://developer.postgresql.org/~petere/