+Title: Best way to create a docbook book?
+Tags: english, nuug, opphavsrett
+Date: 2012-07-31 21:50
+
+<p>I tried to send this text to the
+<ahref="https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook-apps/">docbook-apps
+mailing list at lists.oasis-open.org</a>, but it only accept messages
+from subscribers and rejected my post, and I completely lack the
+bandwidth required to subscribe to another mailing list, so instead I
+try to post my message here and hope my blog readers can help me
+out.</p>
+
+<p>I am quite new to docbook processing, and am climbing a steep
+learning curve at the moment.</p>
+
+<p>To give you some background, I am working on a Norwegian
+translation of the book Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig, and I use
+docbook to handle the process. The files to build the book are
+available from
+<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.
+The book got around 400 pages with parts, images, footnotes, tables,
+index entries etc, which has proven to be a challenge for the free
+software docbook processors. My build platform is Debian GNU/Linux
+Squeeze.</p>
+
+<p>I want to build PDF, EPUB and HTML version of the book, and have
+tried different tool chains to do the conversion from docbook to these
+formats. I am currently focusing on the PDF version, and have a few
+problems.</p>
+
+<ul>
+
+<li>Using dblatex, the <part> handling is not the way I want to,
+ as </part> do not really end the <part>. (See
+ <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/683166">BTS report #683166</a>), the
+ xetex backend (needed to process UTF-8) give incorrect hyphens in
+ index references spanning several pages (See
+ <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/682901">BTS report #682901</a>), and
+ I am unable to get the norwegian template texts (See
+ <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/682936">BTS report #682936</a>).</li>
+
+<li>Using straight xmlto fail with some latex error (See
+ <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/683163">BTS report
+ #683163</a>).</li>
+
+<li>Using xmlto with the fop backend fail to handle images (do not
+ show up in the PDF), fail to handle a long footnote (overlap
+ footnote and text body, see
+ <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/683197">BTS report #683197</a>), and
+ fail to create a correct index (some lack page ref, and the page
+ refs listed are not right).</li>
+
+<li>Using xmlto with the dblatex backend behave like dblatex.</li>
+
+<li>Using docbook-xls with xsltproc + fop have the same footnote and
+ index problems the xmlto + fop processing.</li>
+
+</ul>
+
+<p>So I wonder, what would be the best way to create the PDF version
+of this book? Are some of the bugs found above solved in new or
+experimental versions of some docbook tool chain?</p>
+
+<p>What about HTML and EPUB versions?</p>