This plplot docbook documentation project started as a joint effort by Alan
W. Irwin (AWI) and Rafael Laboissiere (RL) to convert the plplot latexinfo
documentation (last modified in 1995 or earlier) to the docbook sgml format.
The motivations for the project are discussed at
http://www.icp.inpg.fr/~rafael/plplotdoc.  

To summarise, many large software projects (e.g., KDE) use docbook for
documentation.  The sgml docbook syntax is well-documented (see book on
docbook published by O'Reilly and also freely available in an on-line
version at http://www.docbook.org/tdg/html/docbook.html) and straightforward
to learn. From docbook sgml source it is possible to obtain dvi, postscript,
and html forms of the documentation.  Apparently a texinfo form of the
documentation output will soon be available as well.

We finished the conversion project in July 1999.  The output results from
that project are already in better form than what was available from the
latexinfo source that we converted.  The substance (as opposed to form) of
the documentation is the same as the latexinfo form of the documentation and
shares its fundamental problem; the substance of the documentation is
extensive, but dated by the many changes that have occurred for plplot since
1995.

Since that conversion date we have been concentrating on updating the
substance of the documentation to be consistent with plplot version 5.0
which was released in 2000.  We have also been improving the form
of the output postscript and html results.

As of 19 October 2000 the plplot docbook documentation project was added to
the sourceforge cvs of the plplot project by AWI, and all further changes
are documented in plplot/doc/docbook-sgml/src/CHANGES. To get the latest
docbook documentation source update your cvs copy of the plplot source tree.
To get the latest docbook documentation results either build from your
updated source tree (for instructions see
plplot/doc/docbook-sgml/README.developers) or visit
http://plplot.sf.net/resources/index.html.  That page always points to a
recent version of the docbook results.

In the near term AWI plans to mostly work on improving the substance of the
documentation (e.g., adding documentation for a number of API descriptions
that are still missing).  Any help with this task will be most appreciated.
RL has recently generalised the configuration so that the docbook
documentation can be successfully built on many Unix/Linux systems.  He also
plans to convert from the sgml to XML form of docbook, and improve the form
of the postscript, html, etc., docbook output by refining the driver files.
