[olug] SGML Help

[Christopher Cashell]

At Thu, 13 Mar 03, Unidentified Flying Banana Don Kauffman, said:
> This is going to sound really stupid to some of you  but what do we use 
> to open an SGML document for reading?  I've tried to open it with galeon 

SGML stands for Standard Generalized Markup Language.  It's most similar
to XML and is actually used to define other languages (HTML up through
4.01 is defined in SGML).  There are a couple of very well written
introductions to it available[1]

The short of it, is that you can think of SGML files as analogous to
source code.  Before it will be of much use, you have to compile it into
a more usable form.  Most likely, the SGML files you're dealing with are
DocBook[2] files (DocBook is a cousin to HTML. . . both are defined with
SGML; HTML is designed for web pages, DocBook is designed for technical
documentation and books; both have slightly different tags and syntax
oriented towards their specific use), and what you'll have to do (and
what the Makefile will help do) is translate those files into some other
format, likely such as HTML, PDF, PS, or text.

As I recall, you can try 'make books', if you have the full PostgreSQL
documentation source, /and/ you have the required SGML/DocBook
processing tools.  You can also find out more about some of the
available processing tools (specifically DSSSL and XSL stylesheets)
online[3].

You should also be able to find the PostgreSQL document in an
immediately usable format available.  I'm pretty sure you can get it in
HTML, PDF, text, and more.  If you're using Debian, there are debian
packages for all of them. ;-)

Let me know if there's more we can do to help.

> Don Kauffman

 [1] http://xml.coverpages.org/gentle.html
 [2] http://www.docbook.org/
 [3] http://docbook.sourceforge.net/

-- 
| Christopher
+------------------------------------------------+
| A: No.                                         |
| Q: Should I include quotations after my reply? |
+------------------------------------------------+