[publican-list] publican/PDF/FOP support in f8?

[Murray McAllister]

Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> On Thu, 24 Apr 2008, Jeff Fearn wrote:
> 
>> Robert P. J. Day wrote:
>>>   i'm guessing i already know the answer to this, but is there any
>>> support for PDF generation via FOP?  from what i read, the
>>> appropriate RPMs are in rawhide and i can easily wait for f9 to
>>> get that.  thanks.
>> Hi Robert, version 0.33 is in testing for F8. It should allow for
>> building PDFs with that caveat of no svg's since FOP in F8 can't
>> handle them.
>>
>> https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/F8/FEDORA-2008-3048
>>
>> Cheers, Jeff.
> 
>   thanks.  also (and this is probably WAY off-topic), i'm interested
> in publican since it seems to be a nicer way to (re)write a bunch of
> my linux courseware manuals.  a few years back, i hacked up my own
> toolchain to do pretty much what publican does now, except i added one
> pre-processing step that saved me bunches of time.
> 
>   since, at the time, i didn't see a nice XML editor, i typed in the
> source by hand, but typing full docbook tags like "section" and
> "chapter" and so on was excruciatingly tedious.  so i added a step
> that allowed me to define my own abbreviations for common tags, like
> "pa" for para, "ch" for chapter and so on.  then i added what was
> essentially an identity transform that converted those tags into
> proper docbook, and proceeded to do regular processing from there.
> hacky, yes, but a definite time-saver.
> 
>   and on that note, what *are* people using for actually writing their
> docbook?  open source editors only, of course.  :-)
> 
> rday
> --
> 
> 
> ========================================================================
> Robert P. J. Day
> Linux Consulting, Training and Annoying Kernel Pedantry:
>     Have classroom, will lecture.
> 
> http://crashcourse.ca                          Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA
> ========================================================================

Hi,

I am use Kate. I find the XML validation (you need to install the 
kdeaddons package) to be really helpful when errors occur. Also, in 
Kate, if you go "XML -> Assign Meta DTD...", and select the 
"/usr/share/publican/xsl/docbook.dtd.xml" file, when you begin to type 
an element, such as "<c", it will open a drop-down list of all elements 
starting with "c", that are currently legal to use.

I also really love jEdit - it has a lot of neat features, such as an 
error console that parses on keystroke, so you see immediately when you 
make an error. I think it automatically closes tags for you when you 
start typing "</", which is handy, if you always forgot to close certain 
tags...

I wrote a little document a while ago on using Kate as a XML/Docbook editor:

http://mdious.fedorapeople.org/kate/

That was built using publican - hope you find it useful.

Cheers,

Murray.