"what ever happened to Scribe?"

[Sean Champ]

Hello.

This qualifies more as a post about a structured document language, but, at
least, XML is a subset of that topic-group; also, I think that some folks,
who frequent this list, may be familiar with the thing that I'm looking for
more details about.

In short:

I'm hoping that someone may know of Scribe, and might have, or may know of,
some publicly-available info about the semantics of the Scribe document
language.

I'm hoping to reformat some Scribe-able *.mss files as DocBook XML --
really, to make a full, if non-validating, Scribe-to-DocBook formatting engine.

The full overview:
There's a project that was once in-operation at Carnegie Mellon University,
called Garnet. It's now being maintained in the GarnetLisp project at
SourceForge [see http://sourceforge.net/projects/garnetlisp ]

The documentation for Garnet, in its source form, is in some *.mss files,
which, I've come to understand, were used with a document-processing system
called Scribe.

Though there are some good PostScript versions for all of those *.mss files,
still, I was hoping that some DocBook XML could be made of them --
to be able to get some HTML out of it, and to make the documentation
more maintainable in the source form (not that it needs updating,
necessarily, but .. well, as a 'matter of principle').

The Scribe format is rather intelligible, thankfully. Given a source *.mss
document and a final postscript document, and one can sort of
reverse-engineer it, enough to figure out what some of the Scribe
@directives() are for. Still, there is some ambiguity I've found about it,
and I want to get it on-the-mark here.
So: Would anyone happen to know of any documents that might offer details
about the syntax and semantics of Scribe structure and formatting
@directives()?
[as it happens, the Scribe, which they used with the Garnet docs, is not
the scribe that is available via
http://www-sop.inria.fr/mimosa/fp/Scribe/scribe.html
though that one may be of some interest]

thanks much.
--
Sean Champ
gi****@sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org

[David Dubin]

Sean Champ <gi****@sdf.lonestar.org> writes:

[...]

I'm hoping that someone may know of Scribe, and might have, or may
know of, some publicly-available info about the semantics of the
Scribe document language. [...] So: Would anyone happen to know of any documents that might offer
details about the syntax and semantics of Scribe structure and
formatting @directives()?

You'll want to look at the user manual and the database
administrator's manual. The full titles are as follows:

Scribe document production system, database administrator's guide

Scribe document production system user manual

Both were published by Unilogic, Ltd. of Pittsburgh, PA. There were
also various supplements published for new versions.

Inter-library loan is probably your best bet for getting your hands on
these manuals. I'd check the online catalogs for the Univ. Pitt and
CMU libraries for full citations, then contact your local ILL
librarian.

Dave Dubin
Electronic Publishing Research Group
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

[Sean Champ]

David Dubin <dd****@lindev.isrl.uiuc.edu> wrote:

You'll want to look at the user manual and the database
administrator's manual. The full titles are as follows: Scribe document production system, database administrator's guide Scribe document production system user manual Both were published by Unilogic, Ltd. of Pittsburgh, PA. There were
also various supplements published for new versions. Inter-library loan is probably your best bet for getting your hands on
these manuals. I'd check the online catalogs for the Univ. Pitt and
CMU libraries for full citations, then contact your local ILL
librarian.

thank you, much; i'll look for 'em.
--
Sean Champ
gimbal #at# sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org