Re: porting my book to sgml

[Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo dot com>]

--- Mohammed Elzubeir <elzubeir at arabeyes dot org> wrote:
> Converting your book to SGML is not without problems. There are some
> DocBook directional tags, but they seem to be place-holders and do
> nothing at all. At least, nothing when converted to HTML. 

Yup, but these are issues we need to resolve as part of our Arabization
work.  It should not sway anyone from moving their important documents
to SGML.  If there are bugs/issues with the enire process in DocBook,
for instance, do please voice 'em so we can capture them in our global
TODO list to start moving in getting them resolved (maybe a post to
'developer' would also help).

> Also, converting SGML Docbook documents to PDF (when are in Arabic) are
> not possible. At the very least, I have been unable to successfully do
> so. It seems to be somethig requiring attaching the fonts to the PDF
> (resulting in a larger PDF, but at least a guranteed to work one).

Again, maybe not today but this will need to be fixed and fixed soon :-)

So in short, don't get swayed away from using SGML - it _is_ the way to
document this book.  Are there issues here we need to work out on the
backend, you bet - will they get looked into, you bet.  I'm guessing it
will take at least a couple of months to get the book into SGML and to
write minor fix-up scripts, etc meanwhile we can look into and lobby for
proper DocBook and tools support with regard to Arabic.

Salam.

 - Nadim


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