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6 <title>Petter Reinholdtsen: Typesetting a short story using docbook for PDF, HTML and EPUB
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15 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/">Petter Reinholdtsen
</a>
23 <div class=
"title">Typesetting a short story using docbook for PDF, HTML and EPUB
</div>
24 <div class=
"date">24th March
2013</div>
25 <div class=
"body"><p>A few days ago, during a discussion in
26 <a href=
"http://www.efn.no/">EFN
</a> about interesting books to read
27 about copyright and the data retention directive, a suggestion to read
28 the
1968 short story Kodémus by
29 <a href=
"http://web2.gyldendal.no/toraage/">Tore Åge Bringsværd
</a>
30 came up. The text was only available in old paper books, and thus not
31 easily available for current and future generations. Some of the
32 people participating in the discussion contacted the author, and
33 reported back
2013-
03-
19 that the author was OK with releasing the
34 short story using a
<a href=
"http://www.creativecommons.org/">Creative
35 Commons
</a> license. The text was quickly scanned and OCR-ed, and we
36 were ready to start on the editing and typesetting.
</p>
38 <p>As I already had some experience formatting text in my project to
39 provide a Norwegian version of the Free Culture book by Lawrence
40 Lessig, I chipped in and set up a
41 <a href=
"http://www.docbook.org/">DocBook
</a> processing framework to
42 generate PDF, HTML and EPUB version of the short story. The tools to
43 transform DocBook to different formats are already in my Linux
44 distribution of choice,
<a href=
"http://www.debian.org/">Debian
</a>, so
45 all I had to do was to use the
46 <a href=
"http://dblatex.sourceforge.net/">dblatex
</a>,
47 <a href=
"http://docbook.sourceforge.net/release/xsl/current/epub/README">dbtoepub
</a>
48 and
<a href=
"https://fedorahosted.org/xmlto/">xmlto
</a> tools to do the
49 conversion. After a few days, we decided to replace dblatex with
51 <a href=
"http://wiki.docbook.org/DocBookXslStylesheets">docbook-xsl
</a>),
52 to get the copyright information to show up in the PDF and to get a
53 nicer
<variablelist
> typesetting, but that is just a minor
56 <p>There were a few challenges, of course. We want to typeset the
57 short story to look like the original, and that require fairly good
58 control over the layout. The original short story have three
59 parts/scenes separated by a single horizontally centred star (*), and
60 the paragraphs do not contain only flowing text, but dialogs and text
61 that started on a new line in the middle of the paragraph.
</p>
63 <p>I initially solved the first challenge by using a paragraph with a
64 single star in it, ie
<para
>*
</para
>, but it made sure a
65 placeholder indicated where the scene shifted. This did not look too
66 good without the centring. The next approach was to create a new
67 preprocessor directive
<?newscene?
>, mapping to "
<hr/
>"
68 for HTML and "
<fo:block
text-align="center"
><fo:leader
69 leader-pattern="rule"
rule-thickness="
0.5pt"/
></fo:block
>"
70 for FO/PDF output (did not try to implement this in dblatex, as we had
71 switched at this time). The HTML XSL file looked like this:
</p>
74 <?xml version='
1.0'?
>
75 <xsl:stylesheet xmlns:
xsl="http://www.w3.org/
1999/XSL/Transform" version='
1.0'
>
76 <xsl:template
match="processing-instruction('newscene')"
>
79 </xsl:stylesheet
>
80 </pre></blockquote></p>
82 <p>And the FO/PDF XSL file looked like this:
</p>
85 <?xml version='
1.0'?
>
86 <xsl:stylesheet xmlns:
xsl="http://www.w3.org/
1999/XSL/Transform" version='
1.0'
>
87 <xsl:template
match="processing-instruction('newscene')"
>
88 <fo:block
text-align="center"
>
89 <fo:leader
leader-pattern="rule"
rule-thickness="
0.5pt"/
>
92 </xsl:stylesheet
>
93 </pre></blockquote></p>
95 <p>Finally, I came across the
<bridgehead
> tag, which seem to be
96 a good fit for the task at hand, and I replaced
<?newscene?
>
97 with
<bridgehead
>*
</bridgehead
>. It isn't centred, but we
98 can fix it with some XSL rule if the current visual layout isn't
101 <p>I did not find a good DocBook compliant way to solve the
102 linebreak/paragraph challenge, so I ended up creating a new processor
103 directive
<?linebreak?
>, mapping to
<br/
> in HTML, and
104 <fo:block/
> in FO/PDF. I suspect there are better ways to do
105 this, and welcome ideas and patches on github. The HTML XSL file now
109 <?xml version='
1.0'?
>
110 <xsl:stylesheet xmlns:
xsl="http://www.w3.org/
1999/XSL/Transform" version='
1.0'
>
111 <xsl:template
match="processing-instruction('linebreak)"
>
113 </xsl:template
>
114 </xsl:stylesheet
>
115 </pre></blockquote></p>
117 <p>And the FO/PDF XSL file looked like this:
</p>
120 <?xml version='
1.0'?
>
121 <xsl:stylesheet xmlns:
xsl="http://www.w3.org/
1999/XSL/Transform" version='
1.0'
122 xmlns:
fo="http://www.w3.org/
1999/XSL/Format"
>
123 <xsl:template
match="processing-instruction('linebreak)"
>
125 </xsl:template
>
126 </xsl:stylesheet
>
127 </pre></blockquote></p>
129 <p>One unsolved challenge is our wish to expose different ISBN numbers
130 per publication format, while keeping all of them in some conditional
131 structure in the DocBook source. No idea how to do this, so we ended
132 up listing all the ISBN numbers next to their format in the colophon
135 <p>If you want to check out the finished result, check out the
136 <a href=
"https://github.com/sickel/kodemus">source repository at
138 (
<a href=
"https://github.com/EFN/kodemus">future/new/official
139 repository
</a>). We expect it to be ready and announced in a few
143 <div class=
"tags">Tags:
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett
</a>.
</div>
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</a></li>
461 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet (
43)
</a></li>
463 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary (
4)
</a></li>
465 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/skepsis">skepsis (
4)
</a></li>
467 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard (
48)
</a></li>
469 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stavekontroll">stavekontroll (
3)
</a></li>
471 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stortinget">stortinget (
10)
</a></li>
473 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance (
35)
</a></li>
475 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sysadmin">sysadmin (
2)
</a></li>
477 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/usenix">usenix (
2)
</a></li>
479 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/valg">valg (
8)
</a></li>
481 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video (
54)
</a></li>
483 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/vitenskap">vitenskap (
4)
</a></li>
485 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web (
37)
</a></li>
491 <p style=
"text-align: right">
492 Created by
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