Re: DOCBOOK-APPS: Non-English language problem

[Jirka Kosek <jkj@kosek.cz>]

On Fri, 22 Sep 2000, Ryszard Lach wrote:

> I'm trying to use docbook DTD to write technical documentation for my company.
> SGML seems to be only good enough soulution ( i need on-line browsing and pretty
> good printouts as well ) and docbook is only DTD with good reference (I used to
> find any documentation e.g. to linuxdoc a few months ago - without effects).

You may also think about XML version of DocBook. There are a lot of tools
which support XML, but does not support SGML. In contrast most SGML tools
are able to process XML.

> My problem is that I have to write in polish language using iso-8859-2 (Latin2)
> character set. Html documents in iso-8859-2 need to have a "meta http-equiv"
> element in header to be displayed correctly, PDF's and other formats suitable
> for printing need to use iso-8859-2 fonts. 
> 
> Because I'm not SGML expert, I ask you for help: where can I find documentation,
> which will help me to nationalize docbook DTD and other tools (I would like to
> use sgml-tools2 package) ?

Almost all is prepared for you yet. If you use Polish language, you should
set lang atribute to pl at the root element of your doc. E.g.

<!DOCTYPE book PUBLIC "...">
<book lang="pl">
 ...
</book>

If you then use XSL or DSSSL stylesheets from Norm, you will get
correct Polish messages for ToC, figure and other parts of document.

If you use SGML version of DocBook, you should set environment variables 

SP_FIXED_CHARSET=YES
SP_ENCODING=iso-8859-2

to instruct Jade to use correct character set.

If you will use XML version, you should write following line as the first
line of each of your XML file.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-2"?>

Only problem is then, that most of XSLT processors (they can be used to
format XML DocBook docs using XSL stylesheets) does not support this
encoding. You can download modified version of XT from my page. It
contains support for iso-8859-2 and windows-1250 encodings.

	http://www.kosek.cz/xml/xt/

Documentation is still only in Czech, I hadn't time to write some info in
English. But I suppouse, that you will understand it as Polish language is
not so different from Czech one.

XSL stylesheet will add HTML meta tag to your doc automatically, but you
must create your own file, which will set correct output encoding and then
import original stylesheets:

<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
		version="1.0">
  <xsl:output method="html" encoding="iso-8859-2"/>
  <xsl:import href="/path/to/xsl/stylesheets/html/docbook.xsl"/>
</xsl:stylesheets>

I'm not sure if DSSSL stylesheets sets meta tag, but it is fairly easy to
modify them to add this piece information into file.

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  Jirka Kosek  	                     
  e-mail: jirka@kosek.cz
  http://www.kosek.cz