On 27 March 2014 12:08, Olivier Bilodeau <[email protected]> wrote: > I would like to chime in to say that I also find it a bit sad that the > default docbook (through fop) looks detached from the html output generated > by asciidoc. External links don't even look the same. With URL in brackets > after the text and no underline. > > Also a saddening fact for people who would like to publish in multiple > format is that customizing docbook is very hard in itself even after all the > effort they did to allow it to be configurable/extensible. The learning > curve is steep.
Indeed docbook and its toolchains (that I know of) are not designed for casual use. But then when you get to publishing high quality print-like output, nothing is. Have you tried tweaking Latex :). Tools like Libreoffice or Adobe tools are indeed simple for simple things, but as you note below the manual steps involved in these tools makes them problematic in the large project case. The ODF backend was an attempt to address this by producing output that could inherit styles generated in Libreoffice. Contributions welcome. > > I've been through this before with PacketFence[1]. Custom frontpage (and > building its xsl from xml), custom fonts, overriding standard docbook xsl > and configuring several of docbook's standard parameters. A lot of time was > spent on this only to have a decent looking but far from perfect PDF. If > there could be a CSS for docbook (and a one-pass javascript to style the xml > maybe?) it would be joy. The fact that there is no solution that I'm aware > of to do code listing syntax highlighting in fop+docbook shows how hard that > would be to do in XSLT. I believe some Java based XSLT processors support Java based syntax highlighting extensions, eg http://www.ohloh.net/p/xslthl > > At my new $work, I've convinced people to use asciidoc+git for its > plaintext/use-your-editor/nicely-looking-html features but the last stretch > to the PDF is done by a designer with proprietary software. It comes with > all the copy and paste errors and forgot to re-apply style errors you can > imagine. For long documents the proof-reading is really a burden. For large jobs automatic always trumps manual. And the setup cost is recovered in less manual tweaking *every time* you re-generate the output. The tendency for rapid releases these days should make the break even happen sooner. > > The fact that asciidoc is "only the first-pass" means that everyone is > duplicating effort on their end trying to make things look good and, I'm > betting, often failing at it. What is O'Reilly doing? What are professional > publishers doing? What is RedHat doing (their Java business is probably full > of asciidoc)? Without having any actual knowledge I would suspect that O'Reilly's toolchain is very specific to their dead tree printing business and probably common for all the input formats they support. So they can afford setup costs amortized over the whole business. Again customised automated toolchains are not for casual users. > > Even if the answer is they finish their last pass with a designer with > proprietary software, my question would be: How do you get the basic markup > through (bold, italics, fixed-width, code blocks, non-breaking characters, > etc.) into that last step? Via docbook role attributes if no specific docbook element exists. And even the specific elements such as <emphasis> that exist still don't say bold, they leave that to toolchains. > > I LOVE asciidoc (do everything in it) but I would like to see a better PDF > publishing story to it. Contributions are welcome. Improvements to free docbook to PDF toolchains would benefit the entire free software community, not just Asciidoc. So I would suggest thats the way to contribute, but "somebody"(tm) has to do it. Cheers Lex > > Cheers > > [1]: https://github.com/inverse-inc/packetfence/tree/stable/docs > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "asciidoc" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/asciidoc. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "asciidoc" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/asciidoc. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
