Multiplatform toolchain for outputting "nice" PDF

[Jean-Christophe Helary <lists@traduction-libre.org>]

For some historical reasons (and maybe others, I don't know), the tool chain used in the project where I'm in charge of the manual uses a very outdated tool chain based on the following elements:

â DocBook XSL Stylesheets 1.75.2 ("dbk") or above
â DocBook XML 4.5 ("docbook-xml-4.5")
â fop 1.1 ("fop-1.1")
â libxml2 2-2.7.7 ("libxml2-2.7.7")
â Saxon 6-5-5 ("saxon")
â XMLmind Web Help Compiler ("whc")
â Ant 1.7.1 or above ("apache-ant")

I'm still investigating the reasons why we're stuck 15 years in the past, but I'd like to move on.

Currently, the PDF that's built from our DocBook set is, not visually pleasant, to say the least.

There are few contributors to the documentation but ideally I'd like something that works equally well on the three major platforms that are Linux / Windows and macOS.

A friend of mine who also is a DITA specialist converted the set to DITA and semi-automatically produced a really nice PDF and there are no reasons why we would not be able to have something equally nice with a modern DocBook toolchain.

So the question is, what are the options?

Thank you in advance for your help.


-- 
Jean-Christophe Helary @brandelune
https://traductaire-libre.org
https://mac4translators.blogspot.com
https://sr.ht/~brandelune/omegat-as-a-book/