Re: [docbook-apps] XML catalogs, images and PDF

[Robert Fekete <frobert@balabit.com>]

Hi,

we've just started to translate our manuals, and we use entities to deal with 
images. Our images are stored in two directories: <main-dir>/<language>/images 
and <main-dir>/images. The first one contains the localized images, the second 
one the language-independent ones. When referencing the images in the XML 
sources, the path includes an entity: fileref="&images;/my-localized-image.png", 
or fileref="&common-images;/my-nonlocalized-image.png".
The entities are defined in a common entity file that is referenced in every XML 
file. &common-images; points to <main-dir>/images, &images; points to the local 
images directory.

That way we had to modify our source XMLs only once, when we decided which 
images will be translated.

HTH.

Regards,

Robert

On 09/21/2012 02:50 PM, Ola Widin wrote:

> Hi there,
>
> Is there anybody out there who has managed to get an XSL-FO renderer to resolve
> image file locations using XML catalogs (or using any other neat trick)?
>
> I have struggled with this for some time now but not managed to come up with a
> working solution, and I'm starting to believe that it is not my XML-fu that is
> limited, but that it is actually not possible with the tools I've used.
>
> More specifically:
> We have a manual that consists of several XML files containing the chapters, and
> a main XML file that just uses XInclude to "collect" the chapters. All XML files
> are located in the same folder (in this case called "en/"). In this folder,
> there is also an "images" folder that contains all the images included in the
> manual (using <imagedata fileref="images/image_file_name.pdf"). Generating a PDF
> for the manual works fine, as long as all referred images are present in the
> "images" folder.
>
> When we translate the manual we send all the (english) XML files to the
> translators, and for each language we get back a set of XML files with the
> "readable" content translated but everything else unchanged - file names, xml:id
> attributes, and fileref attributes for images. The images seldom contains
> anything that needs to be translated, and if they do we take care of that
> ourselves. When generating PDF:s for the translated manuals, we currently have
> to copy the entire "images" folder from the "en" folder to each folder with the
> translated manuals, and then make sure that we correctly replace the few
> translated images.
>
> Now, what I hoped would be possible with XML catalogs was to get the XSL-FO
> renderer to look for the images in multiple locations:
> - First look in the "images" folder in the folder with the current XML files
> - if the image file was not found there, look in the "en/images" folder
>
> This way we would not have to fill the "images" folder for each translation with
> identical copies of the un-translated images, and instead keep only one copy in
> the "en/images" folder. It would also be easier to check that all images that
> need translation are actually translated, since the "images" folder for the
> translated manual would only contain translated images.
>
> So far I have tried using both XEP (that we currently use for generating PDFs)
> and FOP (as an experiment), and xsltproc, Saxon (6.5.5) and Xalan for generating
> the FO files, but nothing has worked for me. I must have tried every trick I
> could find on the interwebs on how to get these tools to resolve using XML
> catalogs, but have this far only managed to get xsltproc to resolve the
> XIncludes in the main XML file (but never Saxon or Xalan).
>
> Best Regards
> /Ola
>
> ---
> Ola Widin
>
> *Kanin Design Information & Interaktion*
> Phone: +46 (0) 709-37 86 10
> E-mail: ola@kanindesign.se <mailto:ola@kanindesign.se>