Re: DOCBOOK-APPS: Re: [Fwd: [Fwd: First Open Source DocumentationSummit at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention]]

["Michael P. Urban" <Michael.P.Urban@jpl.nasa.gov>]

Gary Lawrence Murphy's message dated: Wed, 19 Jul 2000 22:19:45 EDT
> 
>     S> a high level Docbook to LaTeX transform really is a separate
>     S> project from the generic DB->print. doing it might be useful;
>     S> it would be trivial, once you decided what the mapping was
> 
> Trivial, but tedious: It doesn't sound like a weekend project to me ;)
> If it is trivial, though, and FOP is barely off the ground, then isn't
> the shortest path to print DocBook still DB/SGML->LaTeX->DVI?

Only peripherally relevant:

For very simple Docbook things, it is fairly straightforward to write,
for example, a PerlSAX script that translates XML to LaTeX.  For my
own use (mostly as an exercise in better understanding these assorted
tools), I wrote such a thing.  It reads a configuration file (in
effect, its own sort of `stylesheet') that has things like

 (foreignphrase		print "\\textit{";

The fact that the transforms are specified as perl code makes this pretty
flexible, and every time I add a new tag, it has (so far) been more or
less easy to add another clause to handle it.

The sad fact is, for my admittedly not-particularly-elaborate memos
and articles, this tinkertoy produces more typographically
satisfactory results than the other freeware tools, with less
annoyance (how _does_ one customize the XSL stylesheets, other than
dinking with them directly, by the way?)

	Mike




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