As someone who made a similar update, I can provide some perspective. Much of your tool chain may be old, but it's actually "mature," not "outdated." The most limiting element of your tool chain is likely fop. When I migrated from dsssl and jadeTeX to an xsl tool chain, I considered fop alongside Antenna House Formatter and RenderX XEP. As much as I like and admire free tools like fop, the commercial xsl-fo engines are superior. Each of them is available on multiple platforms, and each has a free demo version for evaluation purposes.
The quality of your output may also be much improved by adding a customization layer to the xsl stylesheets. http://www.sagehill.net/docbookxsl/ is a great resource for customization. Sent from my Verizon, Samsung Galaxy smartphone Get Outlook for Android<https://aka.ms/AAb9ysg> ________________________________ From: Jean-Christophe Helary <[email protected]> Sent: Monday, November 14, 2022, 11:16 AM To: [email protected] <[email protected]> Subject: [docbook-apps] Multiplatform toolchain for outputting "nice" PDF For some historical reasons (and maybe others, I don't know), the tool chain used in the project where I'm in charge of the manual uses a very outdated tool chain based on the following elements: • DocBook XSL Stylesheets 1.75.2 ("dbk") or above • DocBook XML 4.5 ("docbook-xml-4.5") • fop 1.1 ("fop-1.1") • libxml2 2-2.7.7 ("libxml2-2.7.7") • Saxon 6-5-5 ("saxon") • XMLmind Web Help Compiler ("whc") • Ant 1.7.1 or above ("apache-ant") I'm still investigating the reasons why we're stuck 15 years in the past, but I'd like to move on. Currently, the PDF that's built from our DocBook set is, not visually pleasant, to say the least. There are few contributors to the documentation but ideally I'd like something that works equally well on the three major platforms that are Linux / Windows and macOS. A friend of mine who also is a DITA specialist converted the set to DITA and semi-automatically produced a really nice PDF and there are no reasons why we would not be able to have something equally nice with a modern DocBook toolchain. So the question is, what are the options? Thank you in advance for your help. -- Jean-Christophe Helary @brandelune https://traductaire-libre.org https://mac4translators.blogspot.com https://sr.ht/~brandelune/omegat-as-a-book/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
