Thanks re docbook to ePub3

[Philo Calhoun <island@luxsci.me>]

Thank you Robert and Richard for your suggestions:

The color issue was solved using your  suggestion:

<para><phrase role="red">Step 1:</phrase> Description of Step 1 etc. </para>, 

and editing the docbook-epub.css.xml file in Oxygen XML to include:

span.red {
  color: rgb(200,0,0);
  font-weight: bold;
}

However, the issue of image scaling seems more problematic, as I have different % scaling of different images within a single topic (from 25% to 100%). The only way I can see to make this work is to have the conversion add some sub style of img, like img.half img.quarter etc. and Iâm not sure how to do it in docbook. I can edit the ePub in Sigil and add that sub style of img, but I then have to add the designation for each and every image file, and that is a lot of work.

I am also having issues with pdf output of cross-references. They work fine in ePub but generate double numbers in pdf. Iâm fairly new to Oxygen XML and docbook, and understand I need to brush up on the conversion algorithms.

I am not using the docbook bibliography designation, as it seems pretty complicated for the mixed types of references (web links, books journals, etc.). So I have the bibiography as a section and designate the entries like:

<listitem>
    <para xml:id=âSmith01â>Smith, J. This is my title. Scientific Journal 2021; 37(4):435-438. </para>
   </listitem>

And cross reference like:

[<link linkend=âSmith01"/>]

As a background, I have a couple of books that need to be in both pdf and ePub outputs and have a lot of cross-references, tables, figures, and mathematical formulas. Iâve used InDesign and Framemaker for them in the past, but migrated to MadCap Flare. Unfortunately, while Flare creates beautiful web output, its pdf and ePub outputs are buggy and limited. This is particularly so with mathematical formulas and fine tuning of the table of contents. I get about 95% of the way there, but have to do a lot of creative workarounds due to problems/bugs with Flare. Due to this frustration, I now publish the print version using LaTeX, which works perfectly, but getting precise ePub output without a lot of carryover junk code (the way Flare does) has been much easier in Oxygen than in Flare. At this point, I still am having to do a fair amount of precise formatting of the Oxygen generated ePub in Sigil. (I tried Jutoh, but it corrupts MathML code unfortunately.) My goal is to get both a clean output and specific image formatting for ePub directly from OxygenXML. The extra level of structure using XML vs XHTML is a huge benefit when it comes to crossreferencing and maintaining consistent formatting.

Thanks again,

Philo

Attachment: smime.p7s
Description: S/MIME cryptographic signature