I tried to send this text to the
-docbook-apps
-mailing list at lists.oasis-open.org, 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.
-
-
I am quite new to docbook processing, and am climbing a steep
-learning curve at the moment.
-
-
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
-github.
-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.
-
-
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.
-
-
-
-- Using dblatex, the <part> handling is not the way I want to,
- as </part> do not really end the <part>. (See
- BTS report #683166), the
- xetex backend (needed to process UTF-8) give incorrect hyphens in
- index references spanning several pages (See
- BTS report #682901), and
- I am unable to get the norwegian template texts (See
- BTS report #682936).
-
-- Using straight xmlto fail with some latex error (See
- BTS report
- #683163).
-
-- 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
- BTS report #683197), and
- fail to create a correct index (some lack page ref, and the page
- refs listed are not right).
-
-- Using xmlto with the dblatex backend behave like dblatex.
-
-- Using docbook-xls with xsltproc + fop have the same footnote and
- index problems the xmlto + fop processing.
-
-
-
-
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?
-
-
What about HTML and EPUB versions?
-