Re: Rules on my PalmOS handheld

["boardgamesbook" <dhohls@...>]

Maybe this is my cue to step and put forward an idea I have working 
on for a while now (but was waiting for the "right" moment to unlease 
on the unsuspecting piecepack community).

In the work that I am doing, I have started to see the tremendous 
benefits offered by XML as an information storage format. For some 
time I have been pondering how it can be more widely used in my 
favourite hobby.  Just recently, I became involved with Joao Neto in 
the creation of an XML file format for his abstract games site 
(http://www.di.fc.ul.pt/~jpn/gv/).  

What I would like to propose is that the community adopts an existing 
XML file format for documentation of the piecepack rules.  XML would 
give us the flexibility to easily publish to PDF, HTML and other 
formats of choice.   It would also allow the creation of 
a 'standardised' look-and-feel for the rule sets, thereby creating a 
better image for the system.  The specific XML format I would like to 
propose is DocBook; perhaps with the addition of a few tags for 
encapsulating some of the meta-data for a game, along with some 
guidelines for rules structuring.  DocBook, while a large spec, is 
widely used and many editors are now able to work directly with it.  
In the longer run, it would also be ideal to convert the game 
diagrams to a format such as SVG - an open graphics standard that is 
very powerful.

The main issues are:
1. permission from rules' authors for the conversion process
2. time required to do the conversion itself; this is mostly copy-and-
paste for the text (hint: this would be something I could start 
tackling over the summer [southern hemisphere!] holidays)

Thoughts?  Comments?

Thanks
Derek


--- In piecepack@yahoogroups.com, Randy Cox <yahoo@c...> wrote:
> I pretty much always have my Clie with me wherever I am.  I would 
like 
> to find a way to copy piecepack rulesets onto it, but the rules at 
> piecepack.org are all in PDF format.  Unfortunately, the PDF viewer 
for 
> PalmOS crashes my Clie.  Does anyone have any suggestions about how 
I 
> could go about creating a piecepack rules library on my Clie?  It 
would 
> be trivial to accomplish if the rules were in HTML format, but PDF 
is 
> right out.
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> --Randy