Tools for Documentation PDF output

[Tommy Reynolds]

Uttered Philip Rodrigues <philip.rodrigues at chch.ox.ac.uk>, spake thus:

> I hope you don't mind me emailing you directly. I'd just like to add a little 
> to what I said on the docbook-apps list about dblatex for PDF generation from 
> DocBook sources. Hopefully, I can provide a little information that can help 
> you to decide whether dblatex is a suitable option for you.
> 
> As you may have found from the sourceforge site, dblatex uses a few tools: The 
> main DocBook -> LaTeX conversion is done by XSLT stylesheets. Because of the 
> vast differences between XML and LaTeX, a further step is necessary (or at 
> least, is used - perhaps it could be dispensed with): the LaTeX document 
> produced is run through a little Perl script which does some things like 
> escaping of LaTeX special characters, and replacing some entities which don't 
> get through properly. pdflatex is then run on the LaTeX code to produce the 
> output PDF. This is all wrapped in a shell script, so you just run one 
> command to go from DocBook all the way to PDF.
> 
> I detailed all that to point out that dblatex uses something of a mish-mash of 
> different technologies, which might not appeal to you. However, it doesn't 
> use Java or jade, which appeals to use here at KDE :-).
> 
> The project is based (I think) on db2latex, a set of XSL stylesheets which did 
> the same thing, but without the Perl post-processing. Sadly, db2latex is 
> unmaintained, but dblatex is very actively maintained, and I've found the 
> author both helpful and very quick to fix any problems I come up with.
> 
> Honesty compels me to say that dblatex isn't quite "there" yet - docbook is so 
> huge that it's quite possible to find a permutation of docbook elements that 
> will produce invalid LaTeX code and therefore break PDF generation for that 
> document. However, whenever I've presented such an issue to Benoît Guillon, 
> the author, he's found a solution quickly. All that said, from the ~250 
> docbook documents in the KDE project, I managed to get it down to only 1 doc 
> producing invalid output with dblatex.
> 
> Another current limitation is that only a few languages are definitely 
> supported. This will change, since I will need support for the many languages 
> in KDE.
> 
> I hope that all helps you to make up your mind about dblatex :-). If you have 
> any other questions, feel free to ask me - if I don't know the answer, I'll 
> pass you on to Benoît. You can also subscribe to the dblatex-users[1] mailing 
> list, where much dblatex discussion happens.
> 
> Regards,
> Philip

Philip,

Thanks for taking the time for such a comphrensive response.  I've
taken the liberty of CC'ing it to other FDP Steering Committte
members to keep them updated.

Thanks again for the input!

Cheers
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