From: Pierre-Charles David <Pierre-Charles.David@...>
Date: 2001-10-01T16:55:33+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:21859] Re: FAQ indexer offerred for ruby faq

Dave Thomas wrote:

> To be honest, I'm kind of thinking of something of a reorganization of
> the FAQ: it's too hard to add stuff. I'm not too keen on Faq-o-matic:
> does anyone know of any other good FAQ systems out there. I'd like to
> be able to represent the FAQ as HTML/XML, PDF, and Postscript as a
> minimum. I'd like to be able to have lists of pending questions, and a
> system which allows folks to submit answers. It needs to be searchable
> and indexed, with a decent hierarchy as well.
> 
> Any ideas?


I have been working on this. I have searched the web for XML DTDs or 
Schemas appropriate for FAQs, but couldn't find anything I liked. I have 
written my own DTD, based on XHTML 1.1 modules (so you can use most of 
the (X)HTML tags you are used to for the text), with a few added 
structural tags (faq, question, answer...). The english and french 
versions of the FAQ have been modified to reflect this DTD. I am 
currently working on the necessary XSLT stylesheets. The one for HTML 
should be straightforward. I plan to write one to transform the source 
into TeXML (an XML dialect representing (La)TeX source), and I have a 
Ruby script to transform this into LaTeX (so PDF and PS will be easy to 
get).

I had not released anything yet because I wasn't sure how far I would 
get (I don't have lots of time to work on it these days). Also, without 
stylesheets, it's pretty useless now. I will release it tomorow (I don't 
have the files with me) and announce the URL here.

-- 
Pierre-Charles David (pcdavid <at> emn <dot> fr)
DEA Informatique, �cole des Mines de Nantes, France