DOCBOOK-APPS: Does JadeTeX work?

[David Nelson <dave@nutters.org>]

Hello everyone,

This is a sincere question, I'd really like an answer: are you using
JadeTeX?  And if so, does it work for you?  Because I've been using
it, and I've found the results to be quite poor.

Let me tell you the story of my woes.

My system: Debian 2.2.  I installed the stable packages for DocBook,
DocBook stylesheets, Jade, JadeTeX, etc., and started work.

HTML output was fine.  I found the TeX output to be a bit ugly, but
making a custom stylesheet helped.  Then I started noticing problems.

First, headings were appearing at the bottom of the pages, with their
first paragraph breaking to the next page.  Very ugly (but technically
not incorrect).  I searched this mailing list, and found that this was
a bug which had been fixed.  So, I installed the unstable JadeTeX
package for Debian, and sure enough, the problem was solved.

Next, I noticed that two-sided output was fine (headers & footers
aligned correctly; and \cleardoublepage at the end of chapters), but
there was a problem with one-sided output: headers correct, but
\cleardoublepage instead of \clearpage.  So there were extraneous
blank pages, which would be suitable for two-sided printing, but which
were ugly & superfluous for one-sided printing.

So, I upgraded to the very latest version of JadeTeX (3.4), by
downloading the sources, making a hugelatex.fmt, and compiling &
installing JadeTeX by hand.  It worked, but the problem wasn't fixed.

Then, I thought that maybe it was a problem with some of the other
packages on my system.  So, I upgraded to unstable docbook,
docbook-stylesheets, and jade, and tried again.  This is where it got
interesting...

The behaviour was REVERSED!  Now, single-sided printing worked fine,
but the two-side setting was ignored.  You may think this was a bad
custom style file, but it wasn't: I set other settings in my style
file, and they worked okay.  But two-sided printing was no longer
possible.

Then, I noticed another bug, which was not just annoying, it was a
serious error.  The page numbers were sometimes off, especially in the
Table of Figures (ToF).  For example: if a figure appeared near the
end of page 7, but was wrapped around to page 8 because of its size,
it would appear in the ToF as page 7, whereas it was really appearing
on page 8.  Bad, bad, bad.

So, I thought to myself, "Time to revert back to the previous
behaviour, and track down exactly what's going wrong."  So I
"downgraded" all relevant Debian packages, back to their stable
versions.  I tried again, but nothing had changed: the output was
still locked into single-sided mode, and figures were still showing up
under the wrong page in the Table of Figures.  I think I'm now
"stuckgraded"!

It occurred to me that I should check an older .dvi file, which I had
built before all this upgrading nonsense, to see that JadeTeX actually
was behaving correctly before I upgraded.  And NO, IT WASN'T!  I
hadn't noticed before, but THE PAGE NUMBERING WAS WRONG ALL ALONG.

-----

I think you get the picture.  In my experience, JadeTeX just doesn't
work right, and I don't know why.  Is it Jade, or JadeTeX, or the
stylesheets, or the Debian setup, or me somehow?  There are a lot of
parts working together here, so I can't tell which one is broken.  

How about you?  Does Jade + DSSSL + JadeTeX work okay for you?  Or are
you using something better?  Would I be better off with something like
OpenJade, or something else not DSSSL-based?

Any advice would be appreciated.


Dave.