Re: AW: [docbook-apps] PDF customization questions from newbie

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

On 2/10/2011 8:02 PM, ben.guillon wrote:
> In a word, if you know and like latex you'll be in a friendly world.

As a happy user of dblatex, I'll second Benoit's (and Robert Buergel's) 
response.  We use it for typesetting grammars, where the primary 
language is English and the secondary languages have challenging 
scripts: Bengali, Urdu, Pashto, which I think would be doubly 
challenging if we used the standard XSL-FO approach.

We've needed to add a few xslt transforms for specialized constructs 
found in grammars (like interlinear text--and of course we've added 
those constructs to our DocBook schemas), and we've made a few other 
modifications to particular transforms for specialized sorts of things. 
  All these changes are kept in separate files and survive upgrades to 
dblatex.

Benoit also mentioned xetex.  Since I assume your DocBook documents are 
in UTF-8, I highly recommend using xe(la)tex as your back end, rather 
than plain latex.  Xetex comes with the TeX-live distro, so if you have 
that you should be all set to go.

    Mike Maxwell
    University of Maryland