<link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/</link>
+ <item>
+ <title>Typesetting a short story using docbook for PDF, HTML and EPUB</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Typesetting_a_short_story_using_docbook_for_PDF__HTML_and_EPUB.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Typesetting_a_short_story_using_docbook_for_PDF__HTML_and_EPUB.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Sun, 24 Mar 2013 17:30:00 +0100</pubDate>
+ <description><p>A few days ago, during a discussion in
+<a href="http://www.efn.no/">EFN</a> about interesting books to read
+about copyright and the data retention directive, a suggestion to read
+the 1968 short story Kodémus by
+<a href="http://web2.gyldendal.no/toraage/">Tore Åge Bringsværd</a>
+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 <a href="http://www.creativecommons.org/">Creative
+Commons</a> license. The text was quickly scanned and OCR-ed, and we
+were ready to start on the editing and typesetting.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<a href="http://www.docbook.org/">DocBook</a> 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, <a href="http://www.debian.org/">Debian</a>, so
+all I had to do was to use the
+<a href="http://dblatex.sourceforge.net/">dblatex</a>,
+<a href="http://docbook.sourceforge.net/release/xsl/current/epub/README">dbtoepub</a>
+and <a href="https://fedorahosted.org/xmlto/">xmlto</a> tools to do the
+conversion. After a few days, we decided to replace dblatex with
+xsltproc/fop (aka
+<a href="http://wiki.docbook.org/DocBookXslStylesheets">docbook-xsl</a>),
+to get the copyright information to show up in the PDF and to get a
+nicer &lt;variablelist&gt; typesetting, but that is just a minor
+technical detail.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>I initially solved the first challenge by using a paragraph with a
+single star in it, ie &lt;para&gt;*&lt;/para&gt;, 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 &lt;?newscene?&gt;, mapping to "&lt;hr/&gt;"
+for HTML and "&lt;fo:block text-align="center"&gt;&lt;fo:leader
+leader-pattern="rule" rule-thickness="0.5pt"/&gt;&lt;/fo:block&gt;"
+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:</p>
+
+<p><blockquote><pre>
+&lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
+&lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'&gt;
+ &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('newscene')"&gt;
+ &lt;hr/&gt;
+ &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
+&lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
+</pre></blockquote></p>
+
+<p>And the FO/PDF XSL file looked like this:</p>
+
+<p><blockquote><pre>
+&lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
+&lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'&gt;
+ &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('newscene')"&gt;
+ &lt;fo:block text-align="center"&gt;
+ &lt;fo:leader leader-pattern="rule" rule-thickness="0.5pt"/&gt;
+ &lt;/fo:block&gt;
+ &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
+&lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
+</pre></blockquote></p>
+
+<p>Finally, I came across the &lt;bridgehead&gt; tag, which seem to be
+a good fit for the task at hand, and I replaced &lt;?newscene?&gt;
+with &lt;bridgehead&gt;*&lt;/bridgehead&gt;. It isn't centred, but we
+can fix it with some XSL rule if the current visual layout isn't
+enough.</p>
+
+<p>I did not find a good DocBook compliant way to solve the
+linebreak/paragraph challenge, so I ended up creating a new processor
+directive &lt;?linebreak?&gt;, mapping to &lt;br/&gt; in HTML, and
+&lt;fo:block/&gt; 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:</p>
+
+<p><blockquote><pre>
+&lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
+&lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'&gt;
+ &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('linebreak)"&gt;
+ &lt;br/&gt;
+ &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
+&lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
+</pre></blockquote></p>
+
+<p>And the FO/PDF XSL file looked like this:</p>
+
+<p><blockquote><pre>
+&lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
+&lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'
+ xmlns:fo="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Format"&gt;
+ &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('linebreak)"&gt;
+ &lt;fo:block/&gt;
+ &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
+&lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
+</pre></blockquote></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>If you want to check out the finished result, check out the
+<a href="https://github.com/sickel/kodemus">source repository at
+github</a>
+(<a href="https://github.com/EFN/kodemus">future/new/official
+repository</a>). We expect it to be ready and announced in a few
+days.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
<item>
<title>Regjeringen, FAD og DIFI går inn for å fjerne ODF som obligatorisk standard i det offentlige</title>
<link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Regjeringen__FAD_og_DIFI_g_r_inn_for___fjerne_ODF_som_obligatorisk_standard_i_det_offentlige.html</link>
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