Welcome to the OS-9 documentation effort. The motivation behind scanning and reissuing the documentation is that without documentation no new users will discover OS-9. This little operating system is more than 20 years old, and we want it to be here for at least another 20 years. We have therefore tried to find the most durable and rich format for documents possible. DocBook is more than 10 years old. Older than MS-Word. It began in 1991 as a joint project of HaL Computer Systems and O'Reilly. It will very likely be around in 2020 also. If it isn't it is a text-based format, so it is possible to reverse-engineer and convert the format. Docbook is in a transition from an SGML-based format to XML. The two formats are not compatible. Primary differences are that the DTD is different. For SGML it is and for XML it is Furthermore, some elements are terminated with /, such as , etc. DOCBOOK SGML SOFTWARE: --------------------- To create HTML, PDF or PostScript you must have these RPMs installed on your RedHat system: docbook-dtd41-sgml sgml-common docbook-utils docbook-utils-pdf tetex-dvips tetex jadetex ..see also http://sources.redhat.com/docbook-tools/ DocBook Install mini-HOWTO: http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/mini/DocBook-Install/ Another approach is the xmlto application installed on newer RedHat systems. DOCBOOK REFERENCES: ------------------- The Duck book http://www.docbook.org/ The KDE DocBook Authors guide http://i18n.kde.org/doc/markup/ The Crash Course to Docbook http://www.caldera.de/~eric/crash-course/HTML/index.html Mark Galassi's tutorial/introduction to writing in DocBook. http://nis-www.lanl.gov/~rosalia/mydocs/docbook-intro.html DOCBOOK EXTENSIONS: ------------------- At the time of this writing Docbook is undergoing modularisation work. One of the new modules is the Extended Backhus-Naur Form, which can be used to describe syntax for shell and the C language. But currently the renderers don't understand the new elements, so we can't use them. I've started to rewrite the shell syntax in os9guide/shell.refentry For Extended Backhus-Naur Forms use: