- <title>Typesetting a short story using docbook for PDF, HTML and EPUB</title>
- <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Typesetting_a_short_story_using_docbook_for_PDF__HTML_and_EPUB.html</link>
- <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Typesetting_a_short_story_using_docbook_for_PDF__HTML_and_EPUB.html</guid>
- <pubDate>Sun, 24 Mar 2013 17:30:00 +0100</pubDate>
- <description><p>A few days ago, during a discussion in
-<a href="http://www.efn.no/">EFN</a> about interesting books to read
-about copyright and the data retention directive, a suggestion to read
-the 1968 short story Kodémus by
-<a href="http://web2.gyldendal.no/toraage/">Tore Åge Bringsværd</a>
-came up. The text was only available in old paper books, and thus not
-easily available for current and future generations. Some of the
-people participating in the discussion contacted the author, and
-reported back 2013-03-19 that the author was OK with releasing the
-short story using a <a href="http://www.creativecommons.org/">Creative
-Commons</a> license. The text was quickly scanned and OCR-ed, and we
-were ready to start on the editing and typesetting.</p>
-
-<p>As I already had some experience formatting text in my project to
-provide a Norwegian version of the Free Culture book by Lawrence
-Lessig, I chipped in and set up a
-<a href="http://www.docbook.org/">DocBook</a> processing framework to
-generate PDF, HTML and EPUB version of the short story. The tools to
-transform DocBook to different formats are already in my Linux
-distribution of choice, <a href="http://www.debian.org/">Debian</a>, so
-all I had to do was to use the
-<a href="http://dblatex.sourceforge.net/">dblatex</a>,
-<a href="http://docbook.sourceforge.net/release/xsl/current/epub/README">dbtoepub</a>
-and <a href="https://fedorahosted.org/xmlto/">xmlto</a> tools to do the
-conversion. After a few days, we decided to replace dblatex with
-xsltproc/fop (aka
-<a href="http://wiki.docbook.org/DocBookXslStylesheets">docbook-xsl</a>),
-to get the copyright information to show up in the PDF and to get a
-nicer &lt;variablelist&gt; typesetting, but that is just a minor
-technical detail.</p>
-
-<p>There were a few challenges, of course. We want to typeset the
-short story to look like the original, and that require fairly good
-control over the layout. The original short story have three
-parts/scenes separated by a single horizontally centred star (*), and
-the paragraphs do not contain only flowing text, but dialogs and text
-that started on a new line in the middle of the paragraph.</p>
-
-<p>I initially solved the first challenge by using a paragraph with a
-single star in it, ie &lt;para&gt;*&lt;/para&gt;, but it made sure a
-placeholder indicated where the scene shifted. This did not look too
-good without the centring. The next approach was to create a new
-preprocessor directive &lt;?newscene?&gt;, mapping to "&lt;hr/&gt;"
-for HTML and "&lt;fo:block text-align="center"&gt;&lt;fo:leader
-leader-pattern="rule" rule-thickness="0.5pt"/&gt;&lt;/fo:block&gt;"
-for FO/PDF output (did not try to implement this in dblatex, as we had
-switched at this time). The HTML XSL file looked like this:</p>
-
-<p><blockquote><pre>
-&lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
-&lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'&gt;
- &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('newscene')"&gt;
- &lt;hr/&gt;
- &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
-&lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
-</pre></blockquote></p>
-
-<p>And the FO/PDF XSL file looked like this:</p>
-
-<p><blockquote><pre>
-&lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
-&lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'&gt;
- &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('newscene')"&gt;
- &lt;fo:block text-align="center"&gt;
- &lt;fo:leader leader-pattern="rule" rule-thickness="0.5pt"/&gt;
- &lt;/fo:block&gt;
- &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
-&lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
-</pre></blockquote></p>
-
-<p>Finally, I came across the &lt;bridgehead&gt; tag, which seem to be
-a good fit for the task at hand, and I replaced &lt;?newscene?&gt;
-with &lt;bridgehead&gt;*&lt;/bridgehead&gt;. It isn't centred, but we
-can fix it with some XSL rule if the current visual layout isn't
-enough.</p>
-
-<p>I did not find a good DocBook compliant way to solve the
-linebreak/paragraph challenge, so I ended up creating a new processor
-directive &lt;?linebreak?&gt;, mapping to &lt;br/&gt; in HTML, and
-&lt;fo:block/&gt; in FO/PDF. I suspect there are better ways to do
-this, and welcome ideas and patches on github. The HTML XSL file now
-look like this:</p>
-
-<p><blockquote><pre>
-&lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
-&lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'&gt;
- &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('linebreak)"&gt;
- &lt;br/&gt;
- &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
-&lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
-</pre></blockquote></p>
-
-<p>And the FO/PDF XSL file looked like this:</p>
-
-<p><blockquote><pre>
-&lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
-&lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'
- xmlns:fo="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Format"&gt;
- &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('linebreak)"&gt;
- &lt;fo:block/&gt;
- &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
-&lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
-</pre></blockquote></p>
-
-<p>One unsolved challenge is our wish to expose different ISBN numbers
-per publication format, while keeping all of them in some conditional
-structure in the DocBook source. No idea how to do this, so we ended
-up listing all the ISBN numbers next to their format in the colophon
-page.</p>
-
-<p>If you want to check out the finished result, check out the
-<a href="https://github.com/sickel/kodemus">source repository at
-github</a>
-(<a href="https://github.com/EFN/kodemus">future/new/official
-repository</a>). We expect it to be ready and announced in a few
-days.</p>
+ <title>Debian Edu interview: Cédric Boutillier</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__C_dric_Boutillier.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__C_dric_Boutillier.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Tue, 4 Jun 2013 10:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p>It has been a while since my last English
+<a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
+interview last November. But the developers and translators are still
+pulling along to get the Wheezy based release out the door, and this
+time I managed to get an interview from one of the French translators
+in the project, Cédric Boutillier.</p>
+
+<p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
+
+<p>I am 34 year old. I live near Paris, France. I am an assistant
+professor in probability theory. I spend my daytime teaching
+mathematics at the university and doing fundamental research in
+probability in connexion with combinatorics and statistical physics.</p>
+
+<p>I have been involved in the Debian project for a couple of years
+and became Debian Developer a few months ago. I am working on Ruby
+packaging, publicity and translation.</p>
+
+<p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
+project?</strong></p>
+
+<p>I came to the Debian Edu project after a call for translation of
+<a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Manuals">the
+Debian Edu manual</a> for the release of Debian Edu Squeeze. Since
+then, I have been working on updating the French translation of the
+manual.
+
+<p>I had the opportunity to make an installation of Debian Edu in a
+virtual machine when I was preparing localised version of some screen
+shots for the manual. I was amazed to see it worked out of the box and
+how comprehensive the list of software installed by default was.</p>
+
+<p>What amazed me was the complete network infrastructure directly
+ready to use, which can and the nice administration interface provided
+by <a href="https://oss.gonicus.de/labs/gosa/">GOsa²</a>. What pleased
+me also was the fact that among the software installed by default,
+there were many "traditional" educative software to learn languages,
+to count, to program... but also software to develop creativity and
+artistic skills with music (<a href="http://ardour.org/">Ardour</a>,
+<a href="http://audacity.sourceforge.net/">Audacity</a>) and
+movies/animation (I was especially thinking of
+<a href="http://linuxstopmotion.sourceforge.net/">Stopmotion</a>).</p>
+
+<p>I am following the development of Debian Edu and am hanging out on
+<a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">#debian-edu</a>.
+Unfortunately, I don't much time to get more involved in this
+beautiful project.</p>
+
+<p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
+Edu?</strong></p>
+
+<p>For me, the main advantages of Skolelinux/Debian Edu are its
+community of experts and its precise documentation, as well as the
+fact that it provides a solution ready to use.</p>
+
+<p>I would add also the fact that it is based on the rock solid Debian
+distribution, which ensures stability and provides a huge collection
+of educational free software.</p>
+
+<p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
+Edu?</strong></p>
+
+<p>Maybe the lack of manpower to do lobbying on the
+project. Sometimes, people who need to take decisions concerning IT do
+not have all the elements to evaluate properly free software
+solutions. The fact that support by a company may be difficult to find
+is probably a problem if the school does not have IT personnel.</p>
+
+<p>One can find support from a company by looking at
+<a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Help/ProfessionalHelp">the
+wiki dokumentation</a>, where some countries already have a number of
+companies providing support for Debian Edu, like Germany or
+Norway. This list is easy to find readily from the manual. However,
+for other countries, like France, the list is empty. I guess that
+consultants proposing support for Debian would be able to provide some
+support for Debian Edu as well.</p>
+
+<p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
+
+<p>I am using the KDE Plasma Desktop. But the pieces of software I use
+most runs in a terminal: Mutt and OfflineIMAP for emails, latex for
+scientific documents, mpd for music. VIM is my editor of choice. I am
+also using the mathematical software
+<a href="http://www.scilab.org/en/scilab/about">Scilab</a> and
+<a href="http://www.sagemath.org/index.html">Sage</a> (built from
+source as not completely packaged for Debian, yet).
+
+<p><strong>Do you have any suggestions for teachers interested in
+using the free software in Debian to teach mathematics and
+statistics?</strong></p>
+
+<p>I do not have any "nice" recommendations for statistics. At our
+university, we use both <a href="http://www.r-project.org/">R</a> and
+Scilab to teach statistics and probabilistic simulations. For
+geometry, there are nice programs:</p>
+
+<ul>
+
+<li><a href="http://www.drgeo.eu/">drgeo</a> and
+<a href="http://edu.kde.org/applications/all/kig">kig</a> to do
+constructions in planar geometry
+
+<li><a href="http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/software/download/kali.html">kali</a>
+to discover symmetry groups (the so-called wallpapers and frieze
+groups), although the interface looks a bit old.</li>
+
+</ul>
+
+<p>I like also
+<a href="http://edu.kde.org/applications/all/cantor">cantor</a>, which
+provides a uniform interface to SciLab, Sage,
+<a href="http://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Octave">Octave</a>, etc...</p>
+
+<p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
+get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
+
+<p>My suggestions would be to</p>
+
+<ul>
+
+<li>advertise the reduction of costs when free software is used.</li>
+
+<li>communicate about the quality of free software projects, using
+ well known examples like Firefox, ThunderBird and
+ OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice.</li>
+
+<li>advertise the living and strong community around the project.</li>
+
+<li>show that it is not more difficult to use than any other
+ system.</li>
+
+</ul>
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