David A. Black wrote:

> I've done some work, along those lines, on a Redcloth -> DocBook
> converter, mainly (but not only) with an eye to converting Hieraki
> books.  It is, at the moment, pretty much an in-place hack of the
> to_html converter, which is actually a fairly effective way to
> bootstrap it, though I'd like to finish and polish it in a really
> DocBook-specific way.

Cool. If you can, please consider the following:

1)  Support v4.4 of the DTD (just released). It adds a new
citation-related element called biblioref that is important for
citations (I'm a scholar, and have been talking to the author of
PyTextile about adding support in Textile for this sort of markup).

http://netapps.muohio.edu/blogs/darcusb/darcusb/archives/2005/02/01/textile-citations-and-favelets

2)  Design it in such a way that it's easy to move to v5, which is the
nextgeneration RELAX NG-based version currently in development. The
changes are not severe, and mostly involve simplifying and
rationalizing DocBook (for example, articleinfo and chapterinfo just
become db:info), as well as namespacing it.

3)  Don't assume DTD-based toolchains (I'm not saying you are; it's
just that many people do). Doctype declarations, for example, should be
optional.

BTW, shouldn't RedCloth have a driver system for different output
modes?  It's an innocent question; I have no background in Ruby (more
XSLT).

Bruce