RE: [docbook-apps] GSoC Project Idea: integrated LaTeX output support for the stylesheets

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

On 2013-04-05 12:19, honyk wrote:
> I entered company that used dblatex. My task was to create outputs 
> that meet
> the corporate identity. I very quickly switched to XSL-FO and 
> commercial
> XSL-FO processor. I still believe this was the only solution to cope 
> with
> that.
>
> If you need huge customizations in TeX based solutions, you need deep
> knowledge both XSLT and TeX parts of the production workflow as you 
> usually
> have to customize both of them.

FWIW, we've used the dblatex solution for five years now, and are very 
pleased with it.  We chose it, rather than the XSL-FO route, because 
we're producing grammars of languages that have mixed left-to-right and 
right-to-left text, and not just garden variety Arabic script).  At the 
time we made this choice, I don't believe XSL-FO supported right-to-left 
text well.  Of course, that probably matters not at all in your 
situation!  (BTW, we're actually using XeLaTeX, a Unicode-aware version 
of LaTeX.)

One obvious disadvantage is that we've needed to understand LaTeX (not 
plain TeX), since many of the tweaks rely on changes to our LaTeX style 
sheets, or alternative LaTeX packages.  But this has been an advantage 
at the same time, since the LaTeX typesetting is quite mature and has 
handled everything we've thrown at it.

Someone mentioned that dblatex uses Python.  The amount of Python code 
in dblatex is quite small, and I've never had to do anything with it.  
The xslt code, otoh, I've had to deal with extensively, although most of 
that has had to do with odd things we're doing with the alignment of 
right-to-left text, and some linguistic data structures we've added to 
the standard DocBook structures.

   Mike Maxwell
   University of Maryland