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

[Murray Stokely <murray@stokely.org>]

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On Sat, Oct 27, 2001 at 07:43:36PM +0200, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> 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.

  We ran into many problems over the past 5 months but we've just
finished publication of a 650 page book (The FreeBSD Handbook, 2nd
Edition) using the Jade/DSSSL toolchain.  We used Jade 1.2.1 with some
patches from OpenJade to fix things like "--" being treated as a TeX
ligature, etc..  We also used Norm Walsh's DSSSL stylesheets v1.73
with several thousand lines of customizations.  Eventually we were
able to use JadeTeX 3.11 with url.sty to create nice justified output
that wraps URLs and filenames properly.  A posting by Ian Castle on
this list several months ago showed how to get the page numbering
sorted out so that the front matter (including the preface) is in
Roman numerals while Part I starts the Arabic numbers.  We also did
some work to tweak the footnote generation and to ensure that chapters
and parts always start on recto pages.

  I'm pretty happy with the end result, the cover and the part divider
illustrations were done on MacOS X with QuarkExpress 4.1.  If I ever
do this again I would like to investigate the FrameMaker or RTF
backends some more and see if I could do more of the final touches in
a page layout application.  Tweaking the TeX (and yes even the final
PostScript file was loaded into emacs) was a bit too primitive for my
tastes. ;)

  Almost all of the customizations that we made to the DocBook
stylesheets for our printed output have been checked into the FreeBSD
Documentation Project CVS repository.  The extra options are turned on
with the 'BOOK_OUTPUT' make variable, so typing 'make BOOK_OUTPUT=1
FORMATS=ps' will generate high quality PostScript versions of the
FreeBSD Documentation Set (or any other document that uses the FreeBSD
infrastructure).

	   - Murray

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