Hi Jean,
I think posting a pdf would be a good idea for people to look at the output etc without the need to build it.
One question I haven't asked about pdf output. What is the default output in terms of fonts/styles etc for docs? Does IBM have a standard they use, or is it related to something else? I'm certain that some type of output specs exist that have been found to create good output. I haven't looked around for this information, as I think it would take a while to find good information on this. I would guess that we might need to find font(s) that everyone can build the docs with.
It looks like Helvetica is used for everything within the xslt scripts, with sizes of 30, 24, 20, 16,11, 8.
http://xml.apache.org/fop/fonts.html has a bit more information on fonts related to FOP.
Something I found out today. Transforming a doc on OS X, the Helvetica fonts were using Arial instead. I noticed the generated PDF Jeff has on the site also shows this when using Acrobat under x86Linux. On OSX the transformed document we created today looked really bad. When I generated the same thing on x86 linux, it looked great. I am new to transformations through FOP etc, so am a bit uncertain about some of this. I tried going to the adobe site that FOP points to and registered, but of course nothing works. I'll get back to that again. But, I am a bit uncertain as to the Used font being different that the Original Font? I do know in postscript that if a font is not available jump to the next font, so I would guess this is the same. FOP says Helvetica is standard, but it doesn't seem to be used.
Also, I think the PDF viewer has a bit to do with what the PDF looks like. As acrobat and gnome-nautilus have a bit of difference in the view.
I don't think the docs look all that bad, just some cleaning up and trying to figure out some of the mysteries of PDF output :-)
thanks, scott
Jean T. Anderson wrote:
For anyone who is inclined to fiddle, can you include some basic instructions on how to produce a pdf, let's say for just the Getting Started guide, using saxon and the default DITA xslt stylesheets as a starting point? Are these style sheets included in any of the downloads from http://incubator.apache.org/derby/manuals? Also, maybe it would help to post a pdf that exhibits the issues you and Scott discussed.
-jean
Jeff Levitt wrote:
Another issue I was hoping to discuss is the PDF
output of the DITA files. Scott Hutinger and I spent
some time using saxon and fop to create pdf's from the
dita, and we found that some of the issues we are
having with it can be worked around (for example, a
solution Scott found for the lack of a generated
index), but also some that we need more knowledge of
XSL to fix. For example, when one page links to
another page, the link doesnt show the title of the
new page, it instead displays an id for the page,
which is jibberish. Is there anyone out there that
knows XSL enough to be able to modify the DITA XSL
files so that they display information correctly? There are currently three books available on the Derby
Manuals page that are already in DITA, so if anyone
wants to work with them, they are already available.
