Re: DOCBOOK-APPS: stylesheets availability

[Jorge Godoy <godoy@conectiva.com>]

On Tue, 28 Nov 2000, ndw@nwalsh.com wrote:
>
> I'd be curious to know what people are customizing in extensive to
> medium ways. I'm happy to try to make things easier to customize and
> more stable.

One thing that I found hard to do --- and I think it isn't the way I
want on my customized stylesheets --- is the positioning of
admonitions and graphics (and their elements).

I'd like to have a simple element to make images centered and with
their title together with them. We could, after literaly copying the
graphics definition and changing some places, cetralize the image, but
not the title -- yet. 

The other thing is with regards to spacing before / after the icon on
admonitions. We also had to copy lots of things from the original
stylesheets to make the indentation looks better. 


Unfortunately, the biggest problem is not with the stylesheet itself,
but with the tool used to process the output we get from this
stylesheet. If there was a way to get PostScript (or DVI) or PDF
directly with Jade + DSSSL, it would be *very* nice. But it isn't a
problem of yours. :-))



My suggestion is to have everything we can as variables so that just
by customizing these, we could change a log of things. And also to
reduce the blocks of implementation. Having smaller blocks would allow
us to modify them easuly when just changing variables don't give us
the appearance we need. 

I see that we already have several variables, but we could get even
more. If people don't know them now, they won't need to change their
defaults. 

The small blocks would allow us to change specific behaviours of some
element. 



I know that we have this in some degree, but I think that if it was
more modular, it would ease things while customizing them.


Maybe I just wasn't lucky enough to find a really good "Learn DSSSL
very fast to customize you DocBook documents appearance" tutorial. :-)
DSSSL is too complex. But I'm trying to learn it more... :-)


 
See you,
-- 
Godoy. <godoy@conectiva.com>

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