[Glastonbury] "tomorrow's" meeting - Review of Martin's presentation

[Kelvin McNulty]

On Tuesday 11 January 2005 13:41, Martin Wheeler wrote:
...
> So I suggest that as from tomorrow, we adopt a *slightly* more structured
> approach -- first 45 mins for general gassing, swapping tips'n'tricks,
> fixing individual members' problems in the usual meandering fashion.  Next
> 60 mins devoted to a prepared talk (in this case, me; nattering on about
> 'Using Linux as an SGML editing workstation'; followed by 15 mins
> questions and clear-up.

Well, I enjoyed the chance to talk informally with people and when Martin had 
sorted out the projection it felt a bit sad to have to sit still and shut up, 
and I got a little bothered when we seemed to spend a lot of time on various 
methods of inputting text on the command line, and different editors, and 
various people including Martin do have their own very strong preferences for 
different editors (me, I use Pico for little fiddly things and command line 
work, Kate under KDE for big programming jobs, and OpenOffice.org for writing 
human readable stuff).

But things really picked up when we got onto the business of translating from 
various formats into other formats while handling and processing big 
documents, and I got to understand that DocBook is a format, and not a 
program (which I had thought it was - computers, I sometimes think I know 
nothing about them...), and the way the formats are related to each other 
(most derived from SGML) and the history of SGML (much older than I thought) 
and clearly Martin has done a lot of work on this stuff. Thank You Martin, it 
was excellent, and I understand the process a whole lot better now, and am 
glad to be familiar with Linux's ways of dealing with it, even if there is a 
rather bewildering choice of them....

Best,

Kelvin