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

[Jeff Fearn]

On 05/17/2013 03:43 AM, James Pooton wrote:
> Sorry, looks like I was on digest mode here...
>
>> 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.
>
> We just started with a fresh FC18 virtual machine and yum installed
> Publican from the testing repo, so it looks like that's the issue. (It
> pulled in wkhtmltopdf-0.11.0-0.2.rc1.fc18.x86_64 from updates)  I saw you
> had some patched FC15 packages posted on the wiki.  After getting
> libtiff.so.3 in place, I was able to install your packages and PDF output
> is different.  However, now there is a blank "title page" on the PDF
> followed by the Preface and content.  So I assume there is some hiccup in
> using the FC15 packages.
>
> If there is a forthcoming patched FC18 version coming, we'll just hold
> tight.  Otherwise feel free to point me in the direction of any information
> on the patch, and we can try building.

I had to rework a lot of the packaging between the originals and the ones we are using now. It was breaking KDE and not at all a good citizen :)

>> 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 entities in these tags.
>
> For testing purposes we were just adding the entity to the default entity
> file Publican created for the book.  (videoNEXT_Template.ent in our case)
> which appears to get called in via:
>
> <!ENTITY % BOOK_ENTITIES SYSTEM "videoNEXT_Template.ent">
> %BOOK_ENTITIES;
> ]>
>
> In videoNEXT_Template.ent we just added:
>
> <!ENTITY PRODUCTVER "3.7">
>
> and tried using it in Book_Info.xml via:
>
> <productnumber>&PRODUCTVER;</productnumber>
>
> We also tried directly setting the entity in Book_Info.xml (not that that
> would help us in the end), but the result was the same.

It looks like the module we use to fetch that from the XML isn't expanding entities.

Can you open a bug about this?

>> You can set 'version' in publican.cfg and it won't use the Info file for
> this.
>
> We actually tried that route as well.  For some reason it picked up
> 'version' from publican.cfg and used it in creating the publish path,
> however the value in Book_Info.xml was still used on the HTML title page.

If you use ' <productnumber>&PRODUCTVER;</productnumber>' in the XML and set it in publican.cfg, then it should work. Limiting the number of places you need to change it to 2 ... which is not as good as 1, but better than 472.

Cheers, Jeff.

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