Re: [docbook-apps] Producing interactive PDF forms from DocBook content with XEP

[Frank Arensmeier <farensmeier@gmail.com>]

9 apr 2014 kl. 11:01 skrev Bergfrid Skaara <bergfrid.digitaldias@gmail.com>:

We have a large amount of PDFs generated from modular and singlesourced DocBook XML, and need to expand that portfolio with ineractive PDF forms.

All trails lead back to http://www.renderx.com/reference.html#PDF%20Forms, but they do not say what we need to do in our DocBook XML and XSL files to achieve this.

Do I need to become an XSL-FO expert and write the .fo file by hand?

Do I need to rewrite the XSL to pull something out of the existing XML files? And do I need to add special markup in the XML for this?

Hello Bergfrid!

Since XEP is not explicitly made for Docbook, I doubt you’ll find detailed instructions on the RenderX site on this matter. Besides that, form field generation for PDF output is not part of the ”out-of-the-box” Docbook stylesheets. It will definitely require some customisation of your stylesheets in order to produce usable FO output for XEP.

When it comes to your question about special XML markup, that depends heavily on what you want to achieve – are we talking about just a few elements that should be transformed into editable form fields in the PDF? Are those elements always of the same type (e.g. all email elements)? Do you want the author to be able to determine which element to ”convert” to an editable input field? So, if your XSL-skills are limited, you'll probably need some help on this. You are welcome to drop me a line off-list.

Hälsningar,

/frank