[publican-list] Revision numbers, Screen output and error messages in Publican 3.2.0

[Norman Dunbar]

Afternoon all,

Well, it didn't take me long to hit a snag!

REVISION NUMBERS:

I tried to build an existing Publican book which has existed through a 
number of revisions. It seems that there have been changes in the 
revision history department. These I have found and corrected by simply 
adding a revision to the existing revision number - I changed "1.0" to 
"1.0-0". Not a major problem, as it turns out I only needed to change 
the very first one in the revision history!

If I don't have this new format in the very first revision, the build 
barfs with the following error:

revnumber (1.0) does not match the required format of 
'^([0-9.]*)-([0-9.]*)$/' at /usr/local/bin/publican line 725.


The "add_revision" command will not work, same error, if the first 
revision number is not in the above format.

Problem. It appears that the revision history is assumed to be in 
descending order from most recent revision at the top, to oldest 
revision at  the bottom. My books are the opposite way around. Is there 
a way to get publican to scan for the biggest revision number rather 
than finding the first one?

When I add a revision number, and do not specify the --revnumber 
parameter, it finds the very first existing revision (1.0-0 in my case) 
and adds one to it to give 1.0-1 when the real revision was actually 
3.2-0 and it should have added 3.2.1.


Problem. When I use the --revnumber="3.2-1" parameter, I get it added at 
the very top, so my revision history is now out of sequence. Not a major 
problem, but again, is there a way to get Publican to add the new 
revision at the bottom rather than the top?

Sorry, I'm not a Perl developer, I can sort of muddle though, so I'm 
unable to help in this problem. :-(



SCREEN OUTPUT:

I build the user guide for 3.2 as follows:

cd Publican-v3.2.0/Users_Guide
publican build --langs=en-US --formats=pdf

And let it run. It built quite happily but when I read it, there are 
problems with screen outputs.

In section 1.2. Pull-quote Conventions there is a paragraph with the 
text "Output sent to a terminal is set in mono-spaced roman and 
presented thus:" above a screen/programlisting rendering. The rendering 
is all over the place, rather than being the two separate lines you 
intended.

I reported this/a similar problem a while back and provided a fix as it 
was something that was really getting on my nerves with another of my 
books. (Jeff helped me track it down!)

The following is extracted form my thread "Screen and Programlisting 
oddities in Publican 2.8" dated 15th March 2013:

[extract]
Found it! If I comment out the wrap-option attribute below, as shown, it 
works on my test chapter.

<xsl:attribute-set name="monospace.verbatim.properties" 
use-attribute-sets="verbatim.properties monospace.properties">
         <xsl:attribute name="text-align">start</xsl:attribute>
<!--    <xsl:attribute name="wrap-option">wrap</xsl:attribute> -->
         <xsl:attribute name="hyphenation-character">\</xsl:attribute>
</xsl:attribute-set>


So, comment out line 97 in pdf.xsl for Publican 2.8.
[/extract]

In Publican 3.0, the offending line is also 97 in 
Publican-v3.2.0/Users_Guide/blib/datadir/xsl/pdf.xsl.

WARING: commenting this line out, as above, means that you have to 
manually "wrap" screen and programlistings to keep them within the 
boundaries of a pdf page. However, it does fix my screen problem - and 
makes the User Guide much better formatted!



ERROR MESSAGES:

Also, when building, I see lots of these errors/warnings:

Invalid property value encountered in keep-together.within-column="": 
org.apache.fop.fo.expr.PropertyException: 
file:/home/norman/Publican/Publican-v3.2.0/Users_Guide/build/en-US/xml/Users_Guide.fo:3629:48: 
No conversion defined ; property:'keep-together.within-column' (See 
position 3629:421)


Also in my thread mentioned above, I "resolved" this by editing line 405 
of pdf.xsl, which is part of the attribute set for example.properties. 
The line needs a value adding between "><" - from this:

<xsl:attribute name="keep-together.within-column"></xsl:attribute>

To this:

<xsl:attribute name="keep-together.within-column">auto</xsl:attribute>



Cheers,
Norm.

-- 
Norman Dunbar
Dunbar IT Consultants Ltd

Registered address:
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