On Sunday, September 14, 2014 9:30:18 AM UTC-4, Robin Powell wrote:
That sounds like you're talking about doing it by hand?
If so, I think you're badly underestimating how cross-reference
heavy (i.e. index and glossary entries) this book is; that's a
staggering amount of work.
More importantly, the problem with by-hand changes is that it's hard
to demonstrate that the *content* hasn't changed. I would
definitely consider the burden of proof that the text is all the
same to be on you in that case.
Here's a preliminary example of chapter 1: https://github.com/trans/cll/blob/markdown/source/01.md (better to look at it in raw format in you favorite text editor though)
A couple of points about it:
1. The changes that would have to be accounted for when the markdown is transformed to XHTML are: `<p>` instead of `<para>`, `<q>` instead of `<quote>`, `<li>` instead of `<listitem>` and a few others along the same lines. Basically XHTML instead of Docbook XML in the places where markdown is used. (All other XML is untouched and passed thru.) I still don't fully know what you have planned for the Ruby code, but these could be transformed at that level, or by adding some additional XSL transforms. Not a big deal either way. Probably the most difficult adjustment will be converting `<h*>` to `<section>` markup, but even that isn't terribly difficult.
2. indexterm could be marked-up better. I already wrote a plugin for pandoc to do it. But a Ruby solution would do just as well. This would make the source document even cleaner.
3. In this particular chapter, the image captions section is a bit odd. I wonder how useful these linkends are. I also considered using a table, but wasn't sure what would be best. I just ended up making them separate `pre` sections. Personally I think it would be better if they were first page footnotes of their respective chapters.
So look it over and let me know what you think. It isn't particularly revolutionary to use markdown as a first stage format, but it does make a big difference to the readability (and hence edit-ability) of the source documents.