[publican-list] RHEL 6 packages for publican 2.8 and 3.0.0

[Norman Dunbar]

Morning Raphael,

 > There's dblatex which can do Docbook -> LaTeX -> PDF. I believe that
> dblatex can fullfill al the requirements of Publican even support for
> non-Latin languages provided that we use the right options and LaTeX
> implementation (i.e. xetex instead of the default pdftex).

I had a look at dblatex on (Ubuntu) Mint 13 KDE. It works really well 
out of the box. The default XSLT engine is pdftex but it's an option to 
use xetex - which is installed in the package.

Good points?

It works well, it correctly renders indexes and, where there are 
multiple indexterms on a number of consecutive pages, it automagically 
converts into a page range - so I only need to use an indexterm with 
primary/secondary - I don;t need the start and end of range stuff. Very 
useful indeed.

It correctly renders to pdf the screen and programlistings that I'm 
seeing corruption on in Publican 2.8.2 (See separate thread).

Everything else, so far, appears pretty good.

Bad points?

It barfs with "bad docbook" on a book of mine which validates as correct 
Docbook, and which Publican happily renders to pdf (with screen and 
programlisting troubles though) but doesn't say where there's a problem. 
That makes debugging a tad interesting.

I haven't figured out how to get brands involved yet, so the default 
styles etc are used, there are options for different styles which might 
be useful though.


> At some point I might find the time required to add a dblatex backend
> in Publican... the upstream author of dblatex is also very supportive
> in case we have specific requirements.

This might be a far better arrangement that wkhtmltopdf (sorry Jeff!) as 
there's no need for modified QT etc, and it seems to "just work". I'll 
give it a play with and see what I can get out of it. Thanks for the 
heads up.


Cheers,
Norm.

-- 
Norman Dunbar
Dunbar IT Consultants Ltd

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