Paul, Thank you for the suggestion.
When I think about it, this could actually work better than my approach: if (when) we have to edit the translated manuals, I'm afraid that the XML editor would not be able to locate the images either, which makes it a bit harder to work with the manual. With your Subversion solution it wouldn't be a problem. Best Regards /Ola --- Ola Widin Kanin Design Information & Interaktion Phone: +46 (0) 709-37 86 10 E-mail: [email protected] 21 sep 2012 kl. 15:06 skrev Bort, Paul: > We don’t have that problem because we’re not currently translating, but I’d > like to suggest an alternate approach that might help. We’re keeping all of > our DocBook source (XML and images) in a Subversion repository for change > management, and Subversion has a feature called “externals”. Instead of > trying to fix this in DocBook/XML/FO, you could keep each language’s XML and > images in Subversion, and for images that are common across translations, use > an external to point to the image under the en/ directory. It still uses all > the space on the disk where you’re building the FO, but when you update the > image, all the externals that refer to it will also update when they are next > pulled from the repository. We’re currently using this for things like XSD > files that appear in the reference section of the manual and are also part of > the source tree for the application, so if we update the application, the > documentation follows automatically. > > Regards, > Paul Bort > Systems Engineer > TMW Systems, Inc. > [email protected] > > From: Ola Widin [mailto:[email protected]] > Sent: Friday, September 21, 2012 8:51 AM > To: [email protected] > Subject: [docbook-apps] XML catalogs, images and PDF > > Hi there, > > Is there anybody out there who has managed to get an XSL-FO renderer to > resolve image file locations using XML catalogs (or using any other neat > trick)? > > I have struggled with this for some time now but not managed to come up with > a working solution, and I'm starting to believe that it is not my XML-fu that > is limited, but that it is actually not possible with the tools I've used. > > More specifically: > We have a manual that consists of several XML files containing the chapters, > and a main XML file that just uses XInclude to "collect" the chapters. All > XML files are located in the same folder (in this case called "en/"). In this > folder, there is also an "images" folder that contains all the images > included in the manual (using <imagedata > fileref="images/image_file_name.pdf"). Generating a PDF for the manual works > fine, as long as all referred images are present in the "images" folder. > > When we translate the manual we send all the (english) XML files to the > translators, and for each language we get back a set of XML files with the > "readable" content translated but everything else unchanged - file names, > xml:id attributes, and fileref attributes for images. The images seldom > contains anything that needs to be translated, and if they do we take care of > that ourselves. When generating PDF:s for the translated manuals, we > currently have to copy the entire "images" folder from the "en" folder to > each folder with the translated manuals, and then make sure that we correctly > replace the few translated images. > > Now, what I hoped would be possible with XML catalogs was to get the XSL-FO > renderer to look for the images in multiple locations: > - First look in the "images" folder in the folder with the current XML files > - if the image file was not found there, look in the "en/images" folder > > This way we would not have to fill the "images" folder for each translation > with identical copies of the un-translated images, and instead keep only one > copy in the "en/images" folder. It would also be easier to check that all > images that need translation are actually translated, since the "images" > folder for the translated manual would only contain translated images. > > So far I have tried using both XEP (that we currently use for generating > PDFs) and FOP (as an experiment), and xsltproc, Saxon (6.5.5) and Xalan for > generating the FO files, but nothing has worked for me. I must have tried > every trick I could find on the interwebs on how to get these tools to > resolve using XML catalogs, but have this far only managed to get xsltproc to > resolve the XIncludes in the main XML file (but never Saxon or Xalan). > > Best Regards > /Ola > > --- > Ola Widin > > Kanin Design Information & Interaktion > Phone: +46 (0) 709-37 86 10 > E-mail: [email protected] > > >
