I also had a difficult
start, but once you know where to look, you will make faster progress.
But the mailing list has
been very helpful in these issues, (thanks to all).
I would continue using
XSL and ask questions in the mailing list.
Also helpful was:
http://www.dpawson.co.uk/docbook/
http://www.sagehill.net/docbookxsl/
(of course)
http://docbook.sourceforge.net/release/xsl/current/doc/fo/index.html
http://docbook.sourceforge.net/release/xsl/current/doc/html/index.html
Hinrich
Von: Colin Shapiro
[mailto:cmshapiro@gmail.com]
Gesendet: Montag, 19. Februar 2007
23:17
An:
docbook-apps@lists.oasis-open.org
Betreff: [docbook-apps] General
questions about DocBook -> LaTeX
Hello,
I am currently working on some product data sheets for computer hardware
products that my company makes, and I chose to use DocBook since I want to make
both HTML and PDF versions of these documents. DocBook XML is working
great for this task so far, since I can make both HTML and PDF output from the
same XML source.
However, I am running into the issue where I need to heavily customize the PDF
output (to make it nice and pretty for print), and I am having trouble writing
an XSL stylesheet for FO output to do everything I need. It is growing
more and more complicated as I work on it, and it is proving to be rather
difficult to get FO to work the way I want it to.
I've read online that some people follow a different procedure; instead of
going from DocBook to FO, they go from DocBook to LaTeX before creating their
final PDF print output (using dblatex,
for example). I am wondering if this would be a better publishing model
for my needs, since I know LaTeX is made for print output. I've never
used LaTeX before, however, so it would take some research on my part before
starting to work with it.
So, the point of this email is to ask some general questions, if anyone with
more experience can answer them for me:
1. What are the main advantages of going from DocBook to LaTeX before
generating final print output of documents?
2. If you know what you're doing, can you do most things with XSL stylesheets
and FO that you could do with LaTeX?
3. Which publishing model would be the best choice for making pretty PDFs for
print.
I realize that these are vague questions, and it is probably perfectly valid to
respond "it depends on what you are actually doing in your
documents". I understand this, but I wanted to first get a basic
understanding of what can be gained by the DocBook -> LaTeX publishing model
before further investing large amounts of time in either approach.
Thanks.