noahgibbs | (no subject)

It appears that all available book-writing applications (I'm thinking, like, Docbook here) are more work to learn, install and use than it is to write a dedicated Perl script to keep track of my chapters for me. Sigh.

DocBook seemed like the best choice (though not a good one). DocBook requires evil SGML and DSSSL tools to work with, plus it's a pain to write in. The tools are written in my choice of Java (painfully slow and hard to use) or C++ (doesn't even compile because he uses old-style template instantiation code, which doesn't work on most versions of g++). There's one guy that does all this stuff, including writing a lot of the standards. He's the same guy that put together groff, which is also widely maligned. He seems nice enough, but if you don't like his style, you're apparently out of luck.

So I'll be doing all this as custom Perl scripts.

On a different note, Skotos should be putting up the first of my MUD design articles soon. I've submitted three to them, and they'll be put up once every two weeks, nominally on Mondays.