PDF format guides

[Paul W. Frields]

On Sat, 2007-03-03 at 13:25 +0000, Dimitris Glezos wrote:
> O/H John Babich έγραψε:
> > On 3/1/07, Karsten Wade <kwade at redhat.com> wrote:
> > 
> >> Here is the one I built this morning using htmldoc, as per Dimitris
> >> suggestion:
> > I uploaded a quick PDF I created with no attempt to beautify it. I took
> > your no-chunks HTML and just printed it using cups-PDF. I didn't see
> > any graphics in your web page, except for admonitions icons,  so you
> > won't see any in the doc.
> 
> So we now have two ways to create PDFs. One is `htmldoc` and the other is
> `cups-PDF`.

There are others that are less hacky that I haven't seen yet on the list
-- for example, XSLT to convert DocBook to RML and then using ReportLab
(python-reportlab package) to convert to PDF.  The results are much
cleaner, and still allow very customizable styling.  To do this
properly, someone would have to actually write the XSLT in question,
which is probably not a simple task of a few hours.

I am a bit dismayed at the fact that there seem to be gazillions of ways
to produce PDFs, but no one has invested time in getting DocBook to use
them.  Apparently "laziness" trumps "hubris" in this case.¹  I'd bet
this project warrants a GSoC pitch, since it would benefit pretty much
the entire FOSS community and not just Fedora.

= = =
¹ e.g. http://www.netropolis.org/hash/perl/virtue.html 

-- 
Paul W. Frields, RHCE                          http://paul.frields.org/
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      Fedora Project:  http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PaulWFrields
  irc.freenode.net: stickster @ #fedora-docs, #fedora-devel, #fredlug
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