Re: [docbook-apps] Asciidoc -> docbook -> PDF tooling

2021-11-10 Thread Michael Maxwell

Probably not the solution you're looking for, but we have used dblatex
   http://dblatex.sourceforge.net
(not to be confused with the older db2latex).  For our use 
case--grammars of foreign languages, with mixed languages and scripts 
(Arabic, Bengali, Thaana)--it was probably the only solution.  But if 
you're not familiar with LaTeX, tweaking it might be a steep learning curve.


On 11/9/2021 7:01 AM, Randall Wood wrote:

I am working on an AsciiDoc -> DocBook -> PDF toolchain for an open source project 
(so all tooling must be freely available) because the direct AsciiDoc -> PDF 
toolchain is inadequate for our purposes.

I currently have a java/maven-based AsciiDoc -> DocBook -> FOP -> PDF chain 
within the docbkx-maven-plugin, but would like any suggestions that appear to be better 
maintained and are cross platform.


Randall Wood--

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

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

2021-06-11 Thread Michael Maxwell

> I’ve 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  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


There’s a blast from the past!

I’ve 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 it’s not in
the top couple of reams of the todo list, at the moment.

I expect the future is XML+CSS and that’s 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 90’s when we were
young! :-))

 Be seeing you,
   norm

--
Norman Tovey-Walsh 
https://nwalsh.com/


Linux. Because rebooting is for hardware upgrades.


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

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Re: [docbook-apps] DocBook XSL: The Next Generation

2020-07-29 Thread Michael Maxwell



On 7/29/2020 11:10 AM, Thomas Schraitle wrote:

Just for clarification: how do we get PDF thesedays?


I suspect I'm not part of this "we", but for a different "we": we get 
them via dblatex + (Xe)LaTeX.  That gave us the ability to mix 
left-to-right and right-to-left scripts and still get well-typeset 
results, as well as typesetting tables that ran > 1 page (maybe that's 
doable with other methods, not sure), and interlinear text examples 
(which "we" linguists like to use, but are quite difficult to typeset 
without LaTeX tools).


But I suspect most people don't have our needs, so for most of you this 
would be overkill.

--
Mike Maxwell
"I may not remember, but I never forget."
--Social Crimes, Jane Stanton Hitchcock

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