RE: [docbook-apps] generating pdf from DocBook slides

["honyk" <j.tosovsky@email.cz>]

Dear Stefan,

> Has anyone ever used them to produce pdf from DB Slides ?

I've tried to utilize Slides DTD for our training courses but quicky find
the element suite too small and hence limiting me. 

These courses are finally based on the subset of DocBook 4.4 DTD. The base
is the book element. For groups of slides the chapter is used and the
section element represents a single slide. The content is composed from
itemizedlists/orderedlists/variablelists, mediaobjects, tables, abstracts,
programlistings, ulinks and para elements. It can be inline styled using
emphasis or literal.

There are several formatting helpers (I know it goes against the separating
the content and formatting).
I use three font sizes for title and content utilizing the global attribute
wordsize. I use four types of layouts using the different value of
section/@role. In my case I also need to differentiate the purpose of the
slide (summary, introduction, example, quiz) for which I utilize
section/@label. I had to introduce also a hard page break in the form of PI.

Then I created both PDF and HTML stylesheets that meet our corporate
indentity.

We completely switched from PowerPoint to Docbook. From this single XML
source we can produce slides for (1) classroom trainings (PDF) and for (2)
e-learning (HTML). Most of the content is the same, differences are handled
automatically (when clear) or using the condition attribute (there are no
audios/videos/quizes in PDF or some slides are present in the PDF only).

From my point of view it is very hard to create any single general template.
In the recent change of our corporate design I had to rewrite the HTML
output completely as it was impossible to get the new look just by updating
CSS.

Additionally, as I've written, some slides-specific issues I had to resolve
by frequent utilizing of the 'role' attribute or by unused but inappropriate
(acc. to semantics) attributes (wordsize, label).

After more than year of extensive usage I hope the structure covers all our
trainers needs so if anybody is interested (what Slides DTD doesn't cover
etc.), please look at small (temporary) example here:

[1] http://hroska.cz/slides/slides.xml (XML source with a brief cookbook for
trainers)
[2] http://hroska.cz/slides/slides.pdf (PDF output)
[3] http://hroska.cz/slides/slides.zip (compressed HTML output)

Regards,
Jan