Re: [docbook-apps] DocBook -> PDF paths that aren't hugely expensive?

[Jirka Kosek <jirka@kosek.cz>]

On 22.3.2012 11:11, Robin Lee Powell wrote:

> I don't mind paying for software but I can't afford the thousands
> that XEP costs, for exmaple.

According to http://www.renderx.com/download/shop.html XEP costs 360 USD
which is not free, but far from thousands. Antenna House is for similar
price if your documents are bellow 300 pages.

> I'm feeling a bit grumpy about the whole thing because I was under
> the impression from the DocBook site that I could, ya know, use it
> to produce books.    And so for that hasn't actually worked out
> very well.

I know about many books which had been directly typesetted from DocBook
sources (I made dozen of such books myself). Usually commercial XSL-FO
rendering engine like XEP or AntennaHouse was used. (FOP is almost
there, but not quite yet, it certainly improved in past years.) If you
have strong XSLT and TeX skills you can build on top of dblatex or
db2latex, or even write your own transformation to TeX covering just
DocBook subset used.

			Jirka

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