blog/Best_way_to_create_a_docbook_book_.html

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   6     <title>Petter Reinholdtsen: Best way to create a docbook book?</title>
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  14  <h1>
  15      <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/">Petter Reinholdtsen</a>
  16
  17  </h1>
  18
  19 </div>
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  22     <div class="entry">
  23       <div class="title">Best way to create a docbook book?</div>
  24       <div class="date">31st July 2012</div>
  25       <div class="body"><p>I tried to send this text to the
  26 <a href="https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook-apps/">docbook-apps
  27 mailing list at lists.oasis-open.org</a>, but it only accept messages
  28 from subscribers and rejected my post, and I completely lack the
  29 bandwidth required to subscribe to another mailing list, so instead I
  30 try to post my message here and hope my blog readers can help me
  31 out.</p>
  32
  33 <p>I am quite new to docbook processing, and am climbing a steep
  34 learning curve at the moment.</p>
  35
  36 <p>To give you some background, I am working on a Norwegian
  37 translation of the book Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig, and I use
  38 docbook to handle the process.  The files to build the book are
  39 available from
  40 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.
  41 The book got around 400 pages with parts, images, footnotes, tables,
  42 index entries etc, which has proven to be a challenge for the free
  43 software docbook processors.  My build platform is Debian GNU/Linux
  44 Squeeze.</p>
  45
  46 <p>I want to build PDF, EPUB and HTML version of the book, and have
  47 tried different tool chains to do the conversion from docbook to these
  48 formats.  I am currently focusing on the PDF version, and have a few
  49 problems.</p>
  50
  51 <ul>
  52
  53 <li>Using dblatex, the &lt;part&gt; handling is not the way I want to,
  54    as &lt;/part&gt; do not really end the &lt;part&gt;. (See
  55    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/683166">BTS report #683166</a>), the
  56    xetex backend (needed to process UTF-8) give incorrect hyphens in
  57    index references spanning several pages (See
  58    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/682901">BTS report #682901</a>), and
  59    I am unable to get the norwegian template texts (See
  60    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/682936">BTS report #682936</a>).</li>
  61
  62 <li>Using straight xmlto fail with some latex error (See
  63    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/683163">BTS report
  64    #683163</a>).</li>
  65
  66 <li>Using xmlto with the fop backend fail to handle images (do not
  67    show up in the PDF), fail to handle a long footnote (overlap
  68    footnote and text body, see
  69    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/683197">BTS report #683197</a>), and
  70    fail to create a correct index (some lack page ref, and the page
  71    refs listed are not right).</li>
  72
  73 <li>Using xmlto with the dblatex backend behave like dblatex.</li>
  74
  75 <li>Using docbook-xls with xsltproc + fop have the same footnote and
  76    index problems the xmlto + fop processing.</li>
  77
  78 </ul>
  79
  80 <p>So I wonder, what would be the best way to create the PDF version
  81 of this book?  Are some of the bugs found above solved in new or
  82 experimental versions of some docbook tool chain?</p>
  83
  84 <p>What about HTML and EPUB versions?</p>
  85 </div>
  86
  87       <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>.</div>
  88
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