Once again, it is time to bump up the major version of The Asterix Annotations. The Internet and the world wide web of 2006 is significantly different from that of 1998 when Version 3.0 was published. The hand-coded HTML of Versions 2.0 and 3.0, though pretty in a minimalist sort of way, has not been coping with growth. Maintaining the Annotations had become quite painful and it was time for a dramatic change.

Starting with this version the Annotations will be maintained in DocBook format. This makes it easy to produce the Annotations in multiple formats (HTML, PDF, PS, etc.). Going to DocBook is a sort of trip back memory lane for the Annotations. Ron's version used to formatted in TeX which is an ancestor of DocBook in some ways.

There are significant additions and some minor deletions in this version. The section 'Ideas for new Asterix books' has been removed. It has not evolved in quite a while, and it does not exactly fit in with the rest of the annotations. The most significant addition is a new Index section.

Finally, it is now possible to get a beautifully typeset PDF version of the Annotations that can be printed out and read at your convenience on a lazy Sunday afternoon with a glass of Gaulish wine and roast boar.

Sudhakar Thaths Chandrasekharan