George De Bruin wrote:
Okay,
Being a n00b to asciidoc, I have to agree with Giles, and follow up
with a few questions / comments.
1. Question: is there a collection of templates / extensions for other
document types? I look at LaTeX and see that there are things for
many different academic and professional style documents, and even
extensions for producing presentations, etc. Has anyone started
working on expanding the available templates?
2. Question: what toolchain(s) do I really need to understand for
using asciidoc? I have been struggling through understanding various
parts of the system, and using a2x -v to see what is being invoked,
but that is really not giving me a complete overview of how things are
working, and what knowledge I need to build to understand how the
processing is actually working.
3. Comment: I'm struggling working with the documentation. While it
is clear in the topics it discusses, I am really looking for a pair of
documents. The first would be something that gives me a more
procedural structured approach to each of the major document classes:
a section / part for articles, then a section / part for books, then
maybe an advanced multi-file book section / part. A seperate document
would get into the complete features / technical nitty-gritty for the
tool chain, and each of the templates, etc.I know there are comments
in the current documentation that it needs to be split up, is there
any work being done on this? If I felt I was understanding asciidoc
better, I would offer to help with this.
Anyway, I would appreciate assistance as a n00b with asciidoc, but not
as a computer n00b (I'm a unix/linux server administrator, and someone
who conceptually understands SGML/LaTeX, but has always used a GUI
front-end for them, and am now trying to break away and get myself
back into a preferred methodology for working with everything from
documents to shell scripts and source code...)
All that asciidoc does is generate the DocBook markup, nothing more. You are
then free to use whatever DocBook processor apps best suit your needs to
generate the output presentation format (see
http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/userguide.html#X12). The set of apps you use
to convert DocBook to presentation formats is the DocBook Toolchain.
DocBook was designed to be a semantic markup, so it does not have facilities for
visual styling or customization, this must be handled by the downstream
toolchain apps.
Don't forget that, in addition to DocBook, asciidoc can also gererate HTML
directly without the need for any toolchain apps.
a2x is a wrapper script that is included in the AsciiDoc distribution to ease
the toolchain learning curve:
- a2x sequences and runs asciidoc and toolchain commands for the two common
DocBook toolchains: dblatex and DocBook XSL Stylesheets + FOP.
- a2x doesn't actually generate any presentation files, it just runs the
commands that do.
- a2x uses the modest style sheet additions that come with AsciiDoc for both
DocBook XSL Stylesheets and dblatex (see
http://code.google.com/p/asciidoc/source/browse/docbook-xsl/asciidoc-docbook-xsl.txt
and http://code.google.com/p/asciidoc/source/browse/dblatex/dblatex-readme.txt).
So you see, when it comes to issues of output styling and customization they are
usually something that can only be tweaked by customizing the toolchain commands
and not asciidoc.
To get this sort of highly customised output
(http://www.proconx.com/gcpmg/UMGCPMG-0801.pdf) requires digging deep into
toolchain app documentation.
Hope this makes things a bit clearer.
Cheers, Stuarts
George
On Fri, Mar 19, 2010 at 3:57 PM, Giles <[email protected]> wrote:
Blimey! is what I want to do so specialised that it doesn't warrant a
--doctype pamphlet
feature?
Its a shame that asciidoc assumes that I am writing a book, but then
again I suppose that is what it was designed for.
On Mar 19, 8:53 pm, Mark Fernandes <[email protected]> wrote:
On Fri, Mar 19, 2010 at 10:52 AM, Giles <[email protected]> wrote:
I was wondering is it possible to generate a 1 page pdf file from my
curriculum vitae located here:
[....]
I tried to use a2x , but I don't want to generate a cover page, or
Table of Contents
On Fri, Mar 19, 2010 at 4:12 PM, Cameron Eagans <[email protected]> wrote:
Why not just print to PDF from the one that's generated by a2x? You
can just selectively include pages that way.
How much time have you got? :)
The quickest way I suggest is to do as Cameron says and only print the
pages you want. Another option is to use pdftk to cut out pages you
do not want electronically and then print the ones that remain.
http://www.accesspdf.com/pdftk/
Mind you, either printing, or electronic page removal do not change
the page numbers (should you need to have page numbers included), so
page numbers are always wrong and so on. Also the title page may not
appear they way you want it to.
Another option is to convert the txt to docbook and open the docbook
XML file in a word processor like OpenOffice. This eases some of the
transition pain caused by the other approaches but this solution, too,
can be unwieldy in other aspects like why should one need to use a
word processor in the first place.
A final solution that I can recommend is to convert the txt file to
tex (LaTeX) and then apply a style file to get the PDF the way you
want it to display. The trouble with this approach is now you are left
fiddling with LaTeX and TeX, which can consume copious amounts of your
time.
A solution that I have not explored is to fiddle around with FOP
settings to display the page the way you want to. I am not aware of
how to do that so I cannot help you much there, hopefully someone else
will be able to fill in those gaps for you.
Good Luck, you are going to need it. :)
Mark.
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