A few days ago, during a discussion in
-EFN about interesting books to read
-about copyright and the data retention directive, a suggestion to read
-the 1968 short story Kodémus by
-Tore Ã
ge Bringsværd
-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 Creative
-Commons license. The text was quickly scanned and OCR-ed, and we
-were ready to start on the editing and typesetting.
-
-
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
-DocBook 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, Debian, so
-all I had to do was to use the
-dblatex,
-dbtoepub
-and xmlto tools to do the
-conversion. After a few days, we decided to replace dblatex with
-xsltproc/fop (aka
-docbook-xsl),
-to get the copyright information to show up in the PDF and to get a
-nicer <variablelist> typesetting, but that is just a minor
-technical detail.
-
-
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.
-
-
I initially solved the first challenge by using a paragraph with a
-single star in it, ie <para>*</para>, 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 <?newscene?>, mapping to "<hr/>"
-for HTML and "<fo:block text-align="center"><fo:leader
-leader-pattern="rule" rule-thickness="0.5pt"/></fo:block>"
-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:
-
-
-<?xml version='1.0'?>
-<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'>
- <xsl:template match="processing-instruction('newscene')">
- <hr/>
- </xsl:template>
-</xsl:stylesheet>
-
-
-
And the FO/PDF XSL file looked like this:
-
-
-<?xml version='1.0'?>
-<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'>
- <xsl:template match="processing-instruction('newscene')">
- <fo:block text-align="center">
- <fo:leader leader-pattern="rule" rule-thickness="0.5pt"/>
- </fo:block>
- </xsl:template>
-</xsl:stylesheet>
-
-
-
Finally, I came across the <bridgehead> tag, which seem to be
-a good fit for the task at hand, and I replaced <?newscene?>
-with <bridgehead>*</bridgehead>. It isn't centred, but we
-can fix it with some XSL rule if the current visual layout isn't
-enough.
-
-
I did not find a good DocBook compliant way to solve the
-linebreak/paragraph challenge, so I ended up creating a new processor
-directive <?linebreak?>, mapping to <br/> in HTML, and
-<fo:block/> 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:
-
-
-<?xml version='1.0'?>
-<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'>
- <xsl:template match="processing-instruction('linebreak)">
- <br/>
- </xsl:template>
-</xsl:stylesheet>
-
-
-
And the FO/PDF XSL file looked like this:
-
-
-<?xml version='1.0'?>
-<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'
- xmlns:fo="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Format">
- <xsl:template match="processing-instruction('linebreak)">
- <fo:block/>
- </xsl:template>
-</xsl:stylesheet>
-
-
-
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.
-
-
If you want to check out the finished result, check out the
-source repository at
-github
-(future/new/official
-repository). We expect it to be ready and announced in a few
-days.
-
