[publican-list] PDF title page output and entity use in Publican 3.1.5

[Jeff Fearn]

On 05/16/2013 11:40 AM, James Pooton wrote:
> We're kicking the tires here with Publican 3.1.5, hoping to move our
> documentation set to Docbook. A couple head scratchers have come up -- any
> advice is welcome. :)
>
> In just starting with a plain book ala:
>
> # publican create --name New_Book
>
> and then building html and pdf via:
>
> # cd New_Book
> # publican build --formats=html,pdf --langs=en-US --publish
>
> When viewing the output, we see title page content (from Book_Info.xml) in
> the HTML output, however it's completely missing from PDF output.  PDF's
> appear to be processed via html-pdf.xsl and then rendered to pdf via
> wkhtmltopdf.  Is html-pdf.xsl incomplete currently, or are we overlooking
> something?  The manual mentions title page output for PDF documents, so
> we're puzzled

Where did you get wkhtmltopdf? The version that ships in Fedora for example is linked against an unpatched QT and doesn't have the cover page functionality.

I will harass Rudi to get some FC18 packages built with the useful versions.

> Our other question is regarding entities. They are working fine when used
> within normal paragraph content, however when trying to use one within
> Book_Info.xml like:
>
> <productnumber>&PRODUCTVER;</productnumber>
>
> The build will fail with:
>
> Invalid format for version. Value (EMPTY) does not conform to constraint
> (^[0-9]) at /usr/bin/publican line 713.
>
> So apparently validation happens before substitution.  Our intent would
> just be to abstract some of these items into a central entities file used
> by a collection of docs. Perhaps there is a better route to achieve this?

Are you specifying to the ent file in the Book_Info.xml file? If not you could give that a try. Not sure we ever tested with

You can set 'version' in publican.cfg and it won't use the Info file for this.

> Again, we're new to this, so any input is appreciated.

Welcome to the mad house :)

Cheers, Jeff.


-- 
Jeff Fearn <jfearn at redhat.com>
Senior Software Engineer
Infrastructure Engineering & Development (AEU)
Red Hat Asia Pacific Pty Ltd
GPG: 0x0357E8F0