Re: [docbook-apps] Two nagging problems with docbook2pdf in texlive 2019

[Michael Maxwell <mmaxwell@umd.edu>]

> Iâve been chatting, off and on, with Peter Flynn about working
> on a way to use TeX as a formatting back end in the modern era.

dblatex?
   https://pypi.org/project/dblatex/
   http://dblatex.sourceforge.net

In the period 2006 through 2016, we used dblatex with XeLaTeX a *lot*, 
and found it very good.  It did require some tailoring for our purposes, 
in part because we had some additions to the DocBook schema for 
linguistic "stuff", and in part to convert it into the styles we were 
using, one of which was a style conforming to the Mouton language 
grammar series.  Some of the tailoring was in XSLT (yuck, although I 
suppose your mileage may vary), and some was in LaTeX style sheets.

To boast a little, one of the grammars that we typeset with DocBook + 
dblatex + XeLaTex is here:

https://www.amazon.com/Descriptive-Grammar-Pashto-Its-Dialects/dp/B00XTAT77U/

Unfortunately, the "Look inside" view doesn't let you see our Arabic 
script examples (right-to-left text, of course), but trust me, they're 
pretty :).

It looks like dblatex hasn't been updated for a few years, but in our 
experience it was reasonably mature.  At the very least, it could 
provide a good starting point.

On 6/11/2021 11:00 AM, Norm Tovey-Walsh wrote:
> Kevin Dunn <kdunn@hsc.edu> writes:
> > Thanks, Dave. You were helpful to me 10 years ago. The XEP PDF output
> > looks pretty nice with the default xsl stylesheet. There are some
> > fancy things I achieved with dsssl and jadetex, and I'm not sure how
>
> Thereâs a blast from the past!
>
> Iâve been chatting, off and on, with Peter Flynn about working on a way
> to use TeX as a formatting back end in the modern era. But itâs not in
> the top couple of reams of the todo list, at the moment.
>
> I expect the future is XML+CSS and thatâs what I have in mind for the
> xslTNG stylesheets. It would be entirely possible, of course, to
> generate XSL-FO, but it feels like custom-HTML output and custom-CSS fed
> through Antennahouse would be the shortest path to victory.
>
> PrinceXML would also work that way.
>
> AFAIK, there are no free formatters that take HTML+CSS and produce
> results comparable with FOP, which surprises me. (Not that the FOP level
> of output would satisfy your requirements; but the lack of reasonable
> open source print formatters is one of the things that leads me to
> ponder generating LaTeX. You know, like we did in the 90âs when we were
> young! :-))
>
>                                          Be seeing you,
>                                            norm
>
> --
> Norman Tovey-Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>
> https://nwalsh.com/
>
> > Linux. Because rebooting is for hardware upgrades.

--
    Mike Maxwell
    "Digital objects last forever--or five years,
    whichever comes first."  --Jeff Rothenberg