On 2013-04-05 12:19, honyk wrote:
I entered company that used dblatex. My task was to create outputs
that meet
the corporate identity. I very quickly switched to XSL-FO and
commercial
XSL-FO processor. I still believe this was the only solution to cope
with
that.
If you need huge customizations in TeX based solutions, you need deep
knowledge both XSLT and TeX parts of the production workflow as you
usually
have to customize both of them.
FWIW, we've used the dblatex solution for five years now, and are very
pleased with it. We chose it, rather than the XSL-FO route, because
we're producing grammars of languages that have mixed left-to-right and
right-to-left text, and not just garden variety Arabic script). At the
time we made this choice, I don't believe XSL-FO supported right-to-left
text well. Of course, that probably matters not at all in your
situation! (BTW, we're actually using XeLaTeX, a Unicode-aware version
of LaTeX.)
One obvious disadvantage is that we've needed to understand LaTeX (not
plain TeX), since many of the tweaks rely on changes to our LaTeX style
sheets, or alternative LaTeX packages. But this has been an advantage
at the same time, since the LaTeX typesetting is quite mature and has
handled everything we've thrown at it.
Someone mentioned that dblatex uses Python. The amount of Python code
in dblatex is quite small, and I've never had to do anything with it.
The xslt code, otoh, I've had to deal with extensively, although most of
that has had to do with odd things we're doing with the alignment of
right-to-left text, and some linguistic data structures we've added to
the standard DocBook structures.
Mike Maxwell
University of Maryland
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