Re: DOCBOOK-APPS: FYI - Slides online for a talk I gave on DocBook XML

[Dan York <dyork at e-smith dot com>]

>   http://www.lodestar2.com/people/dyork/talks/docbook/
> 
> On the title page, there are links to the frames and non-frames
> version and, of course, the DocBook XML source file (using Norm's
> Slides doctype).  

>From some comments I have received back, it appears that some folks
may not be aware of Norm's "Slides" DTD and stylesheets.  You can
use them, as I did, to generate HTML slides (and PDF) for presentations.
You can download them from:

  http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=21935

I just now noticed that Norm officially released version 2.0 back in
January (I was using 2.0a1 for these).

You install the slides DTD and stylesheets somewhere on your system
and then create your file along the lines of:

  <?xml version='1.0'?>
  <!DOCTYPE slides SYSTEM "/usr/share/sgml/docbook/xsl-slides-1.1/slides.dtd">
  <slides>
  <slidesinfo>
   ...
  </slidesinfo>

  <foil><title>First slide</title>
   ... whatever DocBook markup you want... 
  </foil>
  <foil>
   ...
  </foil>
  </slides>

You can see my full file at:

  http://www.lodestar2.com/people/dyork/talks/2001/xugo/docbook/intro-docbook.xml

You then just render it using Norm's included stylesheets. So for me, to
generate the non-frames version, I do this:

  $ cd html
  $ xsltproc /usr/share/sgml/docbook/slides-2.0a1/xsl/slides.xsl ../intro-docbook.xml

To generate the frames version, from my main directory, I do:

  $ cd frames
  $ xsltproc /usr/share/sgml/docbook/slides-2.0a1/xsl/frames.xsl ../intro-docbook.xml

I then copied the index.html file from the 'html' directory (the non-frames
version) to my top directory and edited the HTML by hand to have the links
that you see on my title page to the frames and non-frames version, as well as
the link to the XML file.  To generate the PDF file, I just generated FO using
the fo-plain.xsl file found with the other stylesheets, then ran that through
Fop to get something I really wasn't pleased with, but didn't really care
about. :-)

Oh, yeah, I had to copy the images directory from where I installed the slides
so that I would have the arrows and other graphics. And I copied "slides.css"
into my 'html' and 'frames' directories and hacked it up to have the color
and font combinations that I wanted.  I also mucked with a couple of the 
parameters in the frames.xsl and slides.xsl stylesheets, but I forget exactly
what.

Anyway, that's the general idea.  Not exactly as easy as doing something in
PowerPoint and doing "Save As HTML", but a) I'm a DocBook geek and with my
vim macros, whipping up a DocBook file is easy; b) given that the talk was on
DocBook, I felt I should show what DocBook could do; c) I didn't feel like
learning MagicPoint and didn't want to use PowerPoint; d) the resulting
HTML files are decent HTML (unlike pretty much anything that comes out of an
MS application); and e) what the heck, it was fun to do.

Enjoy,
Dan

-- 
Dan York, Product Line Manager, SME Server and ServiceLink
Mitel Networks Corporation                 dan_york@mitel.com
Ph: +1-613-751-4401 Cell: +1-613-263-4312 Fax: +1-613-564-7739 
350 Legget Drive, Ottawa, ON, K2K 2W7 Canada
http://www.mitel.com/sme/  and  http://www.e-smith.com/