Re: [docbook-apps] Need recommendations for the best modern Linux backendtools for DocBook

[maxwell <maxwell@umiacs.umd.edu>]

On 11/24/2010 09:34 AM, maxwell wrote:
> I haven't done a *comparison*, but we routinely use dblatex + XeTeX (= a
> Unicode-aware version of LaTeX) to produce multi-lingual PDF documents. 
> We chose this route because it wasn't clear that the FOP route would 
> deal well with some of the scripts we needed, such as the Nasta'liq 
> version of the Arabic script.

I'll mention one other thing that's nice about using dblatex: there is a
ton of useful LaTeX "packages" out there.  We have a few landscape tables
in our grammars, and they're always a pain in the neck if you're viewing
the PDF.  You can spare the neck pain by picking the monitor up and turning
it sideways, by telling Adobe Reader--and probably most other PDF
readers--to rotate the image sideways; just click on the menu item.  But
even nicer, it turns (pun intended) out that you can embed a piece of code
in the PDF that tells the Reader to rotate any given page.  And there's a
LaTeX package which, given a landscape mode page (which dblatex produces
when it encounters a table with the 'orient="land"' attribute), inserts
that code into the PDF.  A one-line change to our style sheet now produces
PDFs that tell Reader to automagically rotate landscape pages.  I was
impressed!

   Mike Maxwell