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

[Stefan Hinz <stefan.hinz@oracle.com>]

Here's a little anecdote from building-huge-docs land:

> I'm also not concerned about Python as a dependency. It is widely
> available, and seems to me to be a better tool to translate XML to LaTeX
> than XSLT. However I'd be happy to learn otherwise.:-)

The chunked HTML output of the MySQL Reference Manual (see e.g. 
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/index.html) took about 12 hours 
to build, as opposed to the single-file output which takes "just" about 
3 hours. The remaining 9 hours were entirely spent on chunking the HTML 
with XSLT (aka the DocBook XSL standard way of doing this). Last year, 
we created a chunker.py Python script that chunks the single-file HTML 
(which is now the only HTML variant we're building with XSLT), and it 
brought down the chunking portion of build time to 3 seconds (no joke!).

That's just to second Stefan's non-concern about introducing a Python 
dependency. I'm all for sticking to XSLT as the standard for processing 
DocBook to other formats, but since Python can provide a performance 
improvement of factor 10,000 we should probably take it into 
consideration for other processing things, too.

--
Cheers,

Stefan Hinz <stefan.hinz@oracle.com>, MySQL Documentation Manager

Phone: +49-30-82702940, Fax: +49-30-82702941, http://dev.mysql.com/doc

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