Tools for Documentation PDF output

[Mark Johnson]

Thanks Tommy! Great summary of the present fo2pdf tools.

I've been looking really hard at the pdf toolchain issue and admit that 
there's currently not a free top-quality tooclchain for this. We're 
forced into choosing the "least worst" fo2pdf tool, which is not at all 
an optimal situation;)

Although the projects that make use of LaTeX as an intermediate format 
(db*latex) offer all the power of LateX, they seem to fall short in that 
significant *TeX (not xsl) customization is required. It'd be nice if 
all parts of the toolchain were xml-based...

xmlroff looks like it really has great potential, but isn't quite there yet.

I still recommend FOP (at least in the short-term), as it seems to fill 
the bill reasonably well. In fact, the DITA toolkit[1] includes FOP as 
their fo2pdf converter, so, at present, I'm inclined to recommend FOP.

As old as it is, FOP does a fine job implementing the most useful parts 
of the xsl-fo spec. To date it's passed all the tests I've thrown at it.

Please feel free to convince me otherwise...the best tool wins!

Thanks,
Mark

[1] http://sourceforge.net/projects/dita-ot/


Tommy Reynolds wrote:
> Uttered Philip Rodrigues <philip.rodrigues at chch.ox.ac.uk>, spake thus:
> 
> 
>>I hope you don't mind me emailing you directly. I'd just like to add a little 
>>to what I said on the docbook-apps list about dblatex for PDF generation from 
>>DocBook sources. Hopefully, I can provide a little information that can help 
>>you to decide whether dblatex is a suitable option for you.
>>
>>As you may have found from the sourceforge site, dblatex uses a few tools: The 
>>main DocBook -> LaTeX conversion is done by XSLT stylesheets. Because of the 
>>vast differences between XML and LaTeX, a further step is necessary (or at 
>>least, is used - perhaps it could be dispensed with): the LaTeX document 
>>produced is run through a little Perl script which does some things like 
>>escaping of LaTeX special characters, and replacing some entities which don't 
>>get through properly. pdflatex is then run on the LaTeX code to produce the 
>>output PDF. This is all wrapped in a shell script, so you just run one 
>>command to go from DocBook all the way to PDF.
>>
>>I detailed all that to point out that dblatex uses something of a mish-mash of 
>>different technologies, which might not appeal to you. However, it doesn't 
>>use Java or jade, which appeals to use here at KDE :-).
>>
>>The project is based (I think) on db2latex, a set of XSL stylesheets which did 
>>the same thing, but without the Perl post-processing. Sadly, db2latex is 
>>unmaintained, but dblatex is very actively maintained, and I've found the 
>>author both helpful and very quick to fix any problems I come up with.
>>
>>Honesty compels me to say that dblatex isn't quite "there" yet - docbook is so 
>>huge that it's quite possible to find a permutation of docbook elements that 
>>will produce invalid LaTeX code and therefore break PDF generation for that 
>>document. However, whenever I've presented such an issue to Benoît Guillon, 
>>the author, he's found a solution quickly. All that said, from the ~250 
>>docbook documents in the KDE project, I managed to get it down to only 1 doc 
>>producing invalid output with dblatex.
>>
>>Another current limitation is that only a few languages are definitely 
>>supported. This will change, since I will need support for the many languages 
>>in KDE.
>>
>>I hope that all helps you to make up your mind about dblatex :-). If you have 
>>any other questions, feel free to ask me - if I don't know the answer, I'll 
>>pass you on to Benoît. You can also subscribe to the dblatex-users[1] mailing 
>>list, where much dblatex discussion happens.
>>
>>Regards,
>>Philip
> 
> 
> Philip,
> 
> Thanks for taking the time for such a comphrensive response.  I've
> taken the liberty of CC'ing it to other FDP Steering Committte
> members to keep them updated.
> 
> Thanks again for the input!
> 
> Cheers
> 
> 
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Mark Johnson                     <mjohnson at redhat.com>
OS Product Documentation
Engineering, Red Hat, Inc.       <http://www.redhat.com>
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