The Starlink SGML set

This page is a rolling account of the SGML work I'm currently doing. The immediate aim is to investigate the feasiblity of converting the very large Starlink documentation set to SGML. The broader aims are to gain experience with the various standards auxiliary to SGML, such as HyTime, DSSSL and XML, and to investigate their potential use within astronomical data archiving and analysis.

...was the plan. This project is no longer being actively developed. The source set is in the Starlink CVS repository, and is used for some of the Starlink documentation, but it isn't being distributed or advertised.

Results:

• In case you are someone who needs to maintain or adjust one of the SGML/XML documents, you can browse through a recent version of SSN/70.
• As part of this project, I've produced a tool called dvi2bitmap to convert DVI files to bitmaps (this is so that we can use LaTeX to process maths in SGML documents, and display the results on the web). See my dvi2bitmap page for a download and documentation.
• Another, small, part of this project was a wrapper script sgml2xml. This script parses an SGML Internal Document Subset (the bit inside the <!DOCTYPE...> declaration) and re-emits it in an XML-conformant fashion. It doesn't do the hard work of converting the document body -- it relies on sx to do that -- but a couple of folk have found references to it and asked me for it. The script is documented in its header, and also in appendix B of SSN/70; it is released under the terms of the GPL.
• I have an XML briefing, which both acts as an introduction to XML and its distinction from SGML, and acts as an example of the use of the Starlink DTD (source).
• I also maintain a rather miscellenous collection of links on SGML and auxiliary standards.