Re: DOCBOOK-APPS: Best Linux toolchain for SGML->PDF

[Rick Bronson <rick@efn.org>]

Peter,

  Thank you for your very informed help!  I really appreciate it.

  I switched to JadeTeX 3.10.  I'm not using variablelists so I'll
stay with 1.73 style sheets.

  The only two problems I have right now are:

1. Using (define %two-side% #t) forces the beginning of the chapters
to start on the right side, I'd like it not to do this but haven't
figured out how to yet.

2. In the Table of Contents, the first <part> starts on page i, it
seems like it should start on page 1.  The page's that contains the
<partinfo>'s don't have a page number.

  Thanks again for your help.

  Rick


> JadeTeX 3.11 is broken for me, but no one responds to the bug reports at
> SourceForge.  3.10 works better.  The 1.73 style sheets are not usable for
> print output that contains variablelists, because of a bug.  This is
> unfortunate, because that release contains a few other improvements for
> print output.  I don't know about the Jade vs OpenJade situation, but
> OpenJade works for me.
> 
> I'm currently in the process of trying to beat a toolchain approximately
> equal to yours into formatting about 1500 pages of documentation into
> acceptable PDF output.  Problems are tables, various horizontal and
> vertical spacing issues, and breaking of extremely long file and url
> strings.  If you're using the indexing functionality you need a lot of
> fixes.  If you're using bibliographies and/or refentries mixed with
> regular sectioned content you might get broken bookmarks.  I encountered a
> good load of problems that were rather easy to fix, which indicates to me
> that this tool chain isn't widely used for "serious" applications.
> 
> I've also encountered various TeX-related problems, such as pdfTeX not
> accepting png images with some weird error message (and I haven't found a
> way to make pdf images, so I'm running "imageless"), "font substitutions"
> that I have no clue about, and formatting reference pages into TeX messes
> up the linking completely.
> 
> So, er, my opinion is that it can be made to work, but if you're writing
> more than an article then it's a bit of an effort.
> 
> -- 
> Peter Eisentraut   peter_e@gmx.net   http://funkturm.homeip.net/~peter
>