[publican-list] Publican Beta Announcement

[Michael Hideo]

We are pleased to announce a limited beta of Publican 1.0, the XML
publishing package. We are looking for six volunteers to test the new
tool before a general beta test. Limiting participation in the initial
beta ensures that the developers can answer questions in a timely
fashion. If you are interested in participating, please respond to the
Publican list -- publican-list at redhat.com

Publican 1.0 has been completely rewritten and retains little in common
with the original 0.x development versions. Previous reliance on GNU
make has been replaced by perl, making Publican 1.0 many times faster
than its predecessor and requiring fewer dependencies. Furthermore, the
new Publican is far more portable; a .deb package for Ubuntu already
exists, and versions for Windows and Mac OS X are under development.

If you are familiar with previous versions of Publican, you will notice
that the basic parameters of the document are now specified in a
perl-based file named publican.cfg, in place of the old Makefile.
Therefore, you no longer use "make" commands, but invoke Publican
directly with:

publican <action> <options>

The "<action>" parameter tells Publican what to do: "create" a new
document project; "build" an existing project; or "package" files for
shipping. Publican 1.0 also recognises an "old2new" action that
transforms your existing Publican 0.x projects to the new standard,
without touching your XML files in any way.

Among other things, the "<options>" parameter allows you to specify the
language and the format for actions. For example, to "build" the German
and Spanish versions of your document in both pdf and html-single
formats, you would use:

publican build --formats=pdf,html-single --langs=de-DE,es-ES

Moreover, when building multiple language versions, you no longer need
to manually maintain a list of languages; the new Publican determines
available languages for itself by examining the subdirectories in your
document.

Publican 1.0 is also much more flexible in how it implements brands. You
can now create new brands as easily as you create new document projects.
Simply run:

publican create_brand --name=<brand-name>

to create an appropriately named directory containing the generic files
for customising into a complete brand.

To find out more about Publican 1.0 and see a feature-by-feature
comparison between the old and new versions, refer to the publican wiki:
https://fedorahosted.org/publican/wiki/PublicanBetaAnnounce

Cheers,
Mike