blog/data/2023-11-05-docbook-tester.txt

   1 Title: Test framework for DocBook processors / formatters
   2 Tags: english, debian, docbook
   3 Date: 2023-11-05 13:00
   4
   5 <p>All the books I have published so far has been using
   6 <a href="https://docbook.org/">DocBook</a> somewhere in the process.
   7 For the first book, the source format was DocBook, while for every
   8 later book it was an intermediate format used as the stepping stone to
   9 be able to present the same manuscript in several formats, on paper,
  10 as ebook in ePub format, as a HTML page and as a PDF file either for
  11 paper production or for Internet consumption.  This is made possible
  12 with a wide variety of free software tools with DocBook support in
  13 Debian.  The source format of later books have been docx via rst,
  14 Markdown, Filemaker and Asciidoc, and for all of these I was able to
  15 generate a suitable DocBook file for further processing using
  16 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/pandoc">pandoc</a>,
  17 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/asciidoc">a2x</a> and
  18 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/asciidoctor">asciidoctor</a>,
  19 as well as rendering using
  20 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/xmlto">xmlto</a>,
  21 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/dbtoepub">dbtoepub</a>,
  22 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/dblatex">dblatex</a>,
  23 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/docbook-xsl">docbook-xsl</a> and
  24 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/fop">fop</a>.</p>
  25
  26 <p>Most of the <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/publisher/">books I
  27 have published</a> are translated books, with English as the source
  28 language.  The use of
  29 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/po4a">po4a</a> to
  30 handle translations using the gettext PO format has been a blessing,
  31 but publishing translated books had triggered the need to ensure the
  32 DocBook tools handle relevant languages correctly.  For every new
  33 language I have published, I had to submit patches dblatex, dbtoepub
  34 and docbook-xsl fixing incorrect language and country specific issues
  35 in the framework themselves.  Typically this has been missing keywords
  36 like 'figure' or sort ordering of index entries.  After a while it
  37 became tiresome to only discover issues like this by accident, and I
  38 decided to write a DocBook "test framework" exercising various
  39 features of DocBook and allowing me to see all features exercised for
  40 a given language.  It consist of a set of DocBook files, a version 4
  41 book, a version 5 book, a v4 book set, a v4 selection of problematic
  42 tables, one v4 testing sidefloat and finally one v4 testing a book of
  43 articles.  The DocBook files are accompanied with a set of build rules
  44 for building PDF using dblatex and docbook-xsl/fop, HTML using xmlto
  45 or docbook-xsl and epub using dbtoepub.  The result is a set of files
  46 visualizing footnotes, indexes, table of content list, figures,
  47 formulas and other DocBook features, allowing for a quick review on
  48 the completeness of the given locale settings.  To build with a
  49 different language setting, all one need to do is edit the lang= value
  50 in the .xml file to pick a different ISO 639 code value and run
  51 'make'.</p>
  52
  53 <p>The <a href="https://codeberg.org/pere/docbook-example/">test framework
  54 source code</a> is available from Codeberg, and a generated set of
  55 presentations of the various examples is available as Codeberg static
  56 web pages at
  57 <a href="https://pere.codeberg.page/docbook-example/">https://pere.codeberg.page/docbook-example/</a>.
  58 Using this test framework I have been able to discover and report
  59 several bugs and missing features in various tools, and got a lot of
  60 them fixed.  For example I got Northern Sami keywords added to both
  61 docbook-xsl and dblatex, fixed several typos in Norwegian bokmål and
  62 Norwegian Nynorsk, support for non-ascii title IDs added to pandoc,
  63 Norwegian index sorting support fixed in xindy and initial Norwegian
  64 Bokmål support added to dblatex.  Some issues still remains, though.
  65 Default index sorting rules are still broken in several tools, so the
  66 Norwegian letters æ, ø and å are more often than not sorted properly
  67 in the book index.</p>
  68
  69 <p>The test framework recently received some more polish, as part of
  70 publishing my latest book.  This book contained a lot of fairly
  71 complex tables, which exposed bugs in some of the tools.  This made me
  72 add a new test file with various tables, as well as spend some time to
  73 brush up the build rules.  My goal is for the test framework to
  74 exercise all DocBook features to make it easier to see which features
  75 work with different processors, and hopefully get them all to support
  76 the full set of DocBook features.  Feel free to send patches to extend
  77 the test set, and test it with your favorite DocBook processor.
  78 Please visit these two URLs to learn more:</p>
  79
  80 <ul>
  81 <li><a href="https://codeberg.org/pere/docbook-example/">https://codeberg.org/pere/docbook-example/</a></li>
  82 <li><a href="https://pere.codeberg.page/docbook-example/">https://pere.codeberg.page/docbook-example/</a></li>
  83 </ul>
  84
  85 <p>If you want to learn more on Docbook and translations, I recommend
  86 having a look at the <a href="https://docbook.org/">the DocBook
  87 web site</a>,
  88 <a href="https://doccookbook.sourceforge.net/html/en/">the DoCookBook
  89 site<a/> and my earlier blog post on
  90 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/From_English_wiki_to_translated_PDF_and_epub_via_Docbook.html">how
  91 the Skolelinux project process and translate documentation</a>,  a talk I gave earlier this year on
  92 <a href="https://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20230314-oversetting-og-publisering-av-b%c3%b8ker-med-fri-programvare/">how
  93 to translate and publish books using free software</a> (Norwegian
  94 only).</p>
  95
  96 <!--
  97
  98 https://github.com/docbook/xslt10-stylesheets/issues/205 (docbook-xsl: sme support)
  99 https://bugs.debian.org/968437 (xindy: index sorting rules for nb/nn)
 100 https://bugs.debian.org/856123 (pandoc: markdown to docbook with non-english titles)
 101 https://bugs.debian.org/864813 (dblatex: missing nb words)
 102 https://bugs.debian.org/756386 (dblatex: index sorting rules for nb/nn)
 103 https://bugs.debian.org/796871 (dbtoepub: index sorting rules for nb/nn)
 104 https://bugs.debian.org/792616 (dblatex: PDF metadata)
 105 https://bugs.debian.org/686908 (docbook-xsl: index sorting rules for nb/nn)
 106 https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=373747&aid=3556630&group_id=21935 (docbook-xsl: nb/nn support)
 107 https://bugs.debian.org/684391 (dblatex: initial nb support)
 108
 109 -->
 110
 111 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 112 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 113 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>