[Glastonbury] next meeting

[Ian Dickinson]

Hi Martin,
Wednesdays have got a bit complicated for me with family commitments,
so getting to the next meeting could be tricky.

> (If no-one's thought about this yet: Ian, I wouldn't mind hearing how your
> large-project DocBook coding turned out;
Weelll - badly would be the summary. In something of a blow for
DocBook and OSS, I spent the best part of a couple of months wrestling
with tools. Basic DocBook formatting was OK, but I could only get
reasonable .pdf output with non-free XSL-FO tools. The learning curve
was ridiculous (and I count myself as someone who can generally pick
up a new programming language in a day or so). Worst of all was
equation editing and bibliographic references. I tried loads of free
tools, hung out on support lists, recompiled source, emailed with
developers and abjectly failed to get anything working.

After two months, and with my supervisor getting increasingly irate, I
switched back to MsWord with a $30 equation editor plugin and the
ProCite bibliographic tool I've been using for some years. My
productivity went up massively, since I was spending my time actually
writing not try to fix broken software. As a result, my thesis is just
about done now. My guess is that if I was still writing in DocBook I
wouldn't be nearly done.  On reflection, I *could* have gone back to
using LaTeX, which I used to use 15 years ago. Those neurons are
probably revivable! But by the time I'd finished with DocBook I was
desperate to stop focusing on tool issues.

> or Sean, can you enlighten us on
> AJAX techniques?)
How much are non-Linux issues in scope for discussion? There's various
interesting** software stuff I could talk about, but, like ajax, most
of it is operating-system neutral.

Ian

** OK, interesting to me at least :-)