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Subject: Re: [docbook-apps] Show off what you've done with Docbook


On Sun, 13 Sep 2015, maxwell wrote:

On 9/13/2015 12:19 PM, Warren Block wrote:
On Sun, 13 Sep 2015, Gerard Nicol wrote:
2. The complexity of customizing the default look of the documents,
which look OK, but don't look as good as they would need to be to be
put in front of a client.

That is difficult.  Based on my unscientific sampling, XSL is not
well-regarded.  As languages go, it's rarely used and poorly understood.
And then there is the separation between print and other media, which
usually means also dealing with XSL-FO and Fop.  Fop has its own set of
problems.

FWIW, there is (at least) one alternative: dblatex (http://dblatex.sourceforge.net/). No XSL-FO, rather it uses XSLT to convert a DocBook doc to a LaTeX doc, then you run LaTeX. We've used it for book-length grammars (with a couple additions to support things that linguists need). The grammars are (if I may say so) nicely formatted, support right-to-left text, etc.

The FreeBSD DocBook toolchain almost supports dblatex, but the older versions did not have all the features we needed for PDFs. Table of contents and some other things, as I recall. We now have a port of the latest version of dblatex, but it dies mysteriously and needs more investigation. The PDFs produced for my AsciiDoc documents use dblatex, and look great.

Fop 2.0 seems to work somewhat better than older versions, but, like its predecessor, it dies with mysterious errors and is generally difficult to diagnose.

Removing Fop and the Java dependency from our toolchain would be great.


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