Re: DOCBOOK-APPS: Jade/DSSSL vs. DocBook XML V4.1.2

[Holger Rauch <Holger.Rauch@heitec.de>]

Hi Lane!

On Tue, 12 Sep 2000, Lane Stevens wrote:

> [...]
> I have installed the nwalsh modular stylesheets v 1.54. and performed all of
> the tests in the installation instructions successfully.  

There are newer versions of the DSSSL style sheets. I think the current
one is 1.57. Please take a look at

http://www.nwalsh.com/docbook/index.html

> [...] 
> If the following command is executed with SGMLDECL=xml.dcl, 

Sorry, but I've never heard about that variable. The variables I use for
validating XML documents are:

export SP_CHARSET_FIXED=YES
export SP_ENCODING=XML

In addition, I added the following to my SGML_CATALOG_FILES variable:

/usr/local/openjade-1.3/pubtext/xml.soc

(You will have to adjust the path). However, I get a problem when I try to
verify an SGML document after having verified an XML document. More
precisely, I get a lot of strange error messages, which are due to the
fact that the both SP_ variables are still set. I've not yet found a way
to undo the export of variables.

> [...] 
> jade -t sgml -d /my/path/html/docbook.dsl myfile.xml

Another approach is to first convert the file from SGML to XML using "sx",
then use an XSLT processor (like "xt") to produce e. g. a FO output
file. This FO output file can be fed into an XSL FO processor in
conjunction with an XSL FO style sheet in order to produce PDF
output. Unfortunately, I've not yet found an XSL FO processor that
actually produces valid PDF from a DocBook SGML 4.1 document.

Another approach to create PDF is translating the SGML file to a FOT file
and then using "fot2pdf", available from

http://www.pdftech.com

However, this approach has weaknesses when formatting tables. Judging from
what I heard, a workaround is to specify the width of at least one column
when using tables, but I don't know how to do this in DocBook.

> [...] 
> Any/All help regarding this problem will be greatly appreciated.  Also, 
> recommendations on a set of tools/configuration for creation of DocBook 
> XML (I'll do SGML if that makes more sense) that can be rendered as HTML, 
> PDF or other reasonable printed representation would be helpful.

Sorry, I can't really help you on this one, since I'm looking for such a
set of tools myself and I still haven't found any that do a really good
job. (By "really good" I mean that tables are rendered correctly,
including "align" and "valign" attributes). So I'm looking for help on a
good set of tools as well ,-)

Greetings,

	Holger