Older blog entries for jennv (starting at number 2)

Skud has been encouraging me to 'write something about documentation' for the AUUG conference (Australian Unix Users Group).

Me? What can I say about documentation that hasn't been said a zillion times?

Tonight friends dropped in. So I fed them, while Dancer was off swearing at machines. (See his diary). I mentioned the AUUG - and Cat said she was on the program committee and would I /please/ write something.

Argh.

Looks like I'm going to blather on in public about documentation.

Considering what I'm given at work, maybe I should discuss structure. And how a document is really like a program.....

Jenn V.

Spent most of yesterday and half today trying to get Docbook & sgmltools to believe in the new admonitions 'advanced' and 'readme'. Netizen currently has a kludge for it, but I wanted to create an elegant solution.

Got the DTD working just fine, very quickly. nsgmls and sgmltools understood the new admonitions and created the text just fine...

... just not in the same style as the old admonitions. Argh. Hm.

So I tried to elegantly hack the stylesheets - creating a new stylesheet file. Then I tried getting it to work at all, and hacked the files in stylesheets/docbook/nwalsh.

The errors kept changing. So I was making some progress.

But I'm stalled out. And I really should either be doing billable Netizen work, or relaxing.

I'll work on it later. :) Need to make time to sit down and /grok/ stylesheets, sgmltools and maybe jade.

Maybe I should become an SGML guru and add to the documentation on SGML - on the inner workings, rather than the how-to-write-documents.

Jenn V.

Yup. Skud sometimes sleeps on the office floor. So do Morgan and occasionally Thorfinn. Usually not all the same night. Something about being both healthy and dedicated, I think.

My main diary is at http://www.simegen.com/~jenn/diary/. I probably won't maintain two. Yup - you've seen that statement before!