A few days ago, during a discussion in
+EFN about interesting books to read
+about copyright and the data retention directive, a suggestion to read
+the 1968 short story Kodémus by
+Tore Ã
ge Bringsværd
+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 Creative
+Commons license. The text was quickly scanned and OCR-ed, and we
+were ready to start on the editing and typesetting.
+
+
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
+DocBook 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, Debian, so
+all I had to do was to use the
+dblatex,
+dbtoepub
+and xmlto tools to do the
+conversion. After a few days, we decided to replace dblatex with
+xsltproc/fop (aka
+docbook-xsl),
+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.
+
+
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.
+
+
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:
+
+
+<?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>
+
+
+
And the FO/PDF XSL file looked like this:
+
+
+<?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>
+
+
+
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.
+
+
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:
+
+
+<?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>
+
+
+
And the FO/PDF XSL file looked like this:
+
+
+<?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>
+
+
+
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.
+
+
If you want to check out the finished result, check out the
+source repository at
+github
+(future/new/official
+repository). We expect it to be ready and announced in a few
+days.
+
