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: