- <div class="title"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Typesetting_a_short_story_using_docbook_for_PDF__HTML_and_EPUB.html">Typesetting a short story using docbook for PDF, HTML and EPUB</a></div>
- <div class="date">24th March 2013</div>
- <div class="body"><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 <variablelist> 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 <para>*</para>, 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 <?newscene?>, mapping to "<hr/>"
-for HTML and "<fo:block text-align="center"><fo:leader
-leader-pattern="rule" rule-thickness="0.5pt"/></fo:block>"
-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>
-<?xml version='1.0'?>
-<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'>
- <xsl:template match="processing-instruction('newscene')">
- <hr/>
- </xsl:template>
-</xsl:stylesheet>
-</pre></blockquote></p>
-
-<p>And the FO/PDF XSL file looked like this:</p>
-
-<p><blockquote><pre>
-<?xml version='1.0'?>
-<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'>
- <xsl:template match="processing-instruction('newscene')">
- <fo:block text-align="center">
- <fo:leader leader-pattern="rule" rule-thickness="0.5pt"/>
- </fo:block>
- </xsl:template>
-</xsl:stylesheet>
-</pre></blockquote></p>
-
-<p>Finally, I came across the <bridgehead> tag, which seem to be
-a good fit for the task at hand, and I replaced <?newscene?>
-with <bridgehead>*</bridgehead>. 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 <?linebreak?>, mapping to <br/> in HTML, and
-<fo:block/> 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>
-<?xml version='1.0'?>
-<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'>
- <xsl:template match="processing-instruction('linebreak)">
- <br/>
- </xsl:template>
-</xsl:stylesheet>
-</pre></blockquote></p>
-
-<p>And the FO/PDF XSL file looked like this:</p>
-
-<p><blockquote><pre>
-<?xml version='1.0'?>
-<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'
- xmlns:fo="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Format">
- <xsl:template match="processing-instruction('linebreak)">
- <fo:block/>
- </xsl:template>
-</xsl:stylesheet>
-</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>
+ <div class="title"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Victor_Ni_u.html">Debian Edu interview: Victor Nițu</a></div>
+ <div class="date">17th June 2013</div>
+ <div class="body"><p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and
+Skolelinux</a> distribution have users and contributors all around the
+globe. And a while back, an enterprising young man showed up on
+<a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">our IRC channel
+#debian-edu</a> and started asking questions about how Debian Edu
+worked. We answered as good as we could, and even convinced him to
+help us with translations. And today I managed to get an interview
+with him, to learn more about him.</p>
+
+<p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
+
+<p>I'm a 25 year old free software enthusiast, living in Romania,
+which is also my country of origin. Back in 2009, at a New Year's Eve
+party, I had a very nice <strike>beer</strike> discussion with a
+friend, when we realized we have no organised Debian community in our
+country. A few days later, we put together the infrastructure for such
+community and even gathered a nice Debian-ish crowd. Since then, I
+began my quest as a free software hacker and activist and I am
+constantly trying to cover as much ground as possible on that
+field.</p>
+
+<p>A few years ago I founded a small web development company, which
+provided me the flexible schedule I needed so much for my
+activities. For the last 13 months, I have been the Technical Director
+of <a href="http://ceata.org/">Fundația Ceata</a>, which is a free
+software activist organisation endorsed by the FSF and the FSFE, and
+the only one we have in our country.</p>
+
+<p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
+project?</strong></p>
+
+<p>The idea of participating in the Debian Edu project was a surprise
+even to me, since I never used it before I began getting involved in
+it. This year I had a great opportunity to deliver a talk on
+educational software, and I knew immediately where to look. It was a
+love at first sight, since I was previously involved with some of the
+technologies the project incorporates, and I rapidly found a lot of
+ways to contribute.</p>
+
+<p>My first contributions consisted in translating the installer and
+configuration dialogs, then I found some bugs to squash (I still
+haven't fixed them yet though), and I even got my eyes on some other
+areas where I can prove myself helpful. Since the appetite for free
+software in my country is pretty low, I'll be happy to be the first
+one around here advocating for the project's adoption in educational
+environments, and maybe even get my hands dirty in creating a flavour
+for our own needs. I am not used to make very advanced plannings, so
+from now on, time will tell what I'll be doing next, but I think I
+have a pretty consistent starting point.</p>
+
+<p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
+Edu?</strong></p>
+
+<p>Not a long time ago, I was in the position of configuring and
+maintaining a LDAP server on some Debian derivative, and I must say it
+took me a while. A long time ago, I was maintaining a bigger
+Samba-powered infrastructure, and I must say I spent quite a lot of
+time on it. I have similar stories about many of the services included
+with Skolelinux, and the main advantage I see about it is the
+out-of-the box availability of them, making it quite competitive when
+it comes to managing a school's network, for example.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, there is more to say about Skolelinux than the
+availability of the software included, its flexibility in various
+scenarios is something I can't wait to experiment "into the wild" (I
+only played with virtual machines so far). And I am sure there is a
+lot more I haven't discovered yet about it, being so new within the
+project.</p>
+
+<p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
+Edu?</strong></p>
+
+<p>As usual, when it comes to Debian Blends, I see as the biggest
+disadvantage the lack of a numerous team dedicated to the
+project. Every day I see the same names in the changelogs, and I have
+a constantly fear of the bus factor in this story. I'd like to see
+Debian Edu advertised more as an entry point into the Debian
+ecosystem, especially amongst newcomers and students. IMHO there are a
+lot low-hanging fruits in terms of bug squashing, and enough
+opportunities to get the feeling of the Debian Project's dynamics. Not
+to mention it's a very fun blend to work on!</p>
+
+<p>Derived from the previous statement, is the delay in catching up
+with the main Debian release and documentation. This is common though
+to all blends and derivatives, but it's an issue we can all work
+on.</p>
+
+<p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
+
+<p>I can hardly imagine myself spending a day without Vim, since my
+daily routine covers writing code and hacking configuration files. I
+am a fan of the Awesome window manager (but I also like the
+Enlightenment project a lot!),
+<a href="http://www.claws-mail.org/">Claws Mail</a> due to its ease of
+use and very configurable behaviour. Recently I fell in love with
+<a href="https://launchpad.net/redshift">Redshift</a>, which helps me
+get through the night without headaches. Of course, there is much more
+stuff in this bag, but I'll need a blog on my own for doing this!</p>
+
+<p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
+get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
+
+<p>Well, on this field, I cannot do much more than experiment right
+now. So, being far from having a recipe for success, I can only assume
+that:</p>
+
+<ul>
+
+<li>schools would like to get rid of proprietary software</li>
+
+<li>students will love the openness of the system, and will want to
+ experiment with it - maybe we need to harvest the native curiosity
+ of teenagers more?</li>
+
+<li>there is no "right one" when it comes to strategies, but it would
+ be useful to have some success stories published somewhere, so
+ other can get some inspiration from them (I know I'd promote
+ them!)</li>
+
+<li>more active promotion - talks, conferences, even small school
+ lectures can do magical things if they encounter at least one
+ person interested. Who knows who that person might be? ;-)</li>
+
+</ul>
+
+<p>I also see some problems in getting Skolelinux into schools; for
+example, in our country we have a great deal of corruption issues, so
+it might be hard(er) to fight against proprietary solutions. Also,
+people who relied on commercial software for all their lives, would be
+very hard to convert against their will.</p>
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