blog/data/2012-07-31-docbook-help.txt

   1 Title: Best way to create a docbook book?
   2 Tags: english, docbook, freeculture
   3 Date: 2012-07-31 22:00
   4
   5 <p>I tried to send this text to the
   6 <a href="https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook-apps/">docbook-apps
   7 mailing list at lists.oasis-open.org</a>, but it only accept messages
   8 from subscribers and rejected my post, and I completely lack the
   9 bandwidth required to subscribe to another mailing list, so instead I
  10 try to post my message here and hope my blog readers can help me
  11 out.</p>
  12
  13 <p>I am quite new to docbook processing, and am climbing a steep
  14 learning curve at the moment.</p>
  15
  16 <p>To give you some background, I am working on a Norwegian
  17 translation of the book Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig, and I use
  18 docbook to handle the process.  The files to build the book are
  19 available from
  20 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.
  21 The book got around 400 pages with parts, images, footnotes, tables,
  22 index entries etc, which has proven to be a challenge for the free
  23 software docbook processors.  My build platform is Debian GNU/Linux
  24 Squeeze.</p>
  25
  26 <p>I want to build PDF, EPUB and HTML version of the book, and have
  27 tried different tool chains to do the conversion from docbook to these
  28 formats.  I am currently focusing on the PDF version, and have a few
  29 problems.</p>
  30
  31 <ul>
  32
  33 <li>Using dblatex, the &lt;part&gt; handling is not the way I want to,
  34    as &lt;/part&gt; do not really end the &lt;part&gt;. (See
  35    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/683166">BTS report #683166</a>), the
  36    xetex backend (needed to process UTF-8) give incorrect hyphens in
  37    index references spanning several pages (See
  38    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/682901">BTS report #682901</a>), and
  39    I am unable to get the norwegian template texts (See
  40    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/682936">BTS report #682936</a>).</li>
  41
  42 <li>Using straight xmlto fail with some latex error (See
  43    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/683163">BTS report
  44    #683163</a>).</li>
  45
  46 <li>Using xmlto with the fop backend fail to handle images (do not
  47    show up in the PDF), fail to handle a long footnote (overlap
  48    footnote and text body, see
  49    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/683197">BTS report #683197</a>), and
  50    fail to create a correct index (some lack page ref, and the page
  51    refs listed are not right).</li>
  52
  53 <li>Using xmlto with the dblatex backend behave like dblatex.</li>
  54
  55 <li>Using docbook-xls with xsltproc + fop have the same footnote and
  56    index problems the xmlto + fop processing.</li>
  57
  58 </ul>
  59
  60 <p>So I wonder, what would be the best way to create the PDF version
  61 of this book?  Are some of the bugs found above solved in new or
  62 experimental versions of some docbook tool chain?</p>
  63
  64 <p>What about HTML and EPUB versions?</p>