Re: DOCBOOK-APPS: PassiveTex improvement project

[Sven Kitschke <kicke@web.de>]

Hi Bob,

Bob Stayton wrote:

 > Do you use PassiveTex, and do you have suggestions
 > for things that need fixing in it?
 >
[snip]
 >
 > So, what are the glitches that prevent you from
 > putting PassiveTex into production for high quality
 > PDF output?
 >
Oh, now I know what I've forgotten.
I've tested passivetex sometimes ago and now reviewed
the generated PDF document. I've found the following
(this is with stylesheet version 1.49 and the latest
passivetex -- fotex.sty and fotex.xmt from 09.04.2002):

1) the orphan and widow story:
   keep-with-next with chapter/section titles,
   the titles of figures,

2) table borders (top and left are missing) -- this renders
  coorect with fop:

    test | test |
    -----|------|
    test | test |
    -----+------+

But may be also a docbook xsl issue. In the XSL-FO source
I have seen only border-right-* and border-bottom-* attributes
in the fo:table-cell elements.
border-(left|top|bottom|right)-style="solid" attributes are in
the fo:table element.

3) enumerated lists in a table cell:

    left table cell     |                      |
                      1.|list item 1           |
                        |a discussion of item 1|
                      2.|list item2            |
                        |a discussion of item 2|
   ---------------------+----------------------+

4) images with whitespaces in their file names
(for instance: 'the test image.png') render as follows:

                 +--------------+
                 |              |
                 |              |
   test image.png+--------------+

5) index entries
  5a) no indentation for secondary keywords:

xsl-fo snippet:
<fo:block>
   <fo:block>Information<fotex:sort xmlns:fotex="http://www.tug.org/fotex"/>
   </fo:block>
   <fo:block start-indent="1pc">
    <fo:block>
     <fo:block>additional<fotex:sort xmlns:fotex="http://www.tug.org/fotex";>
      <fo:basic-link internal-destination="d0e6478">
       <fo:page-number-citation ref-id="d0e6478"/>
      </fo:basic-link>
     </fotex:sort></fo:block>
    </fo:block>
   </fo:block>
</fo:block>

renders as:

Information
additional 12

  5b) links to pages (but seems to work with the toc!):

    The 'clickable' area (the interactive link) is in the middle of
    the keyword and the page number citation (between additional and 12
    in the example above).

6) glossentry (fo:list-block in xsl-fo):

             a glossterm    a glossdef
       another glossterm    another glossdef
    a long glossdef not fitting    here is the third glossdef
       he last glossterm    the last glossdef

7) A lot of debugging(?) messages in the console window.
   Gone away after patching xmltex.tex at line 227/228
   from
   \def\XML@warn#1{
     ...}
   to
   \def\XML@warn#1{}

8) The conformance section of the website
   http://www.tei-c.org.uk/Software/passivetex/index.html refers
   to the outdated XSL draft specification o fNovember 2001.
   Passivetex implements now the XSL recommendation.

Please contact me if you need more source code. May be some
of the issues are gone in the actual stylesheet release.

Thank you in advance.
Sven