On Sun, Dec 04, 2005 at 12:42:26PM -0500, Glen Mazza wrote:
Simon Pepping wrote:
Another issue I have with FOP and Docbook is that FOP out of the box
does not use catalogs.
ignorance/ I'm unsure what you mean by catalogs.
See http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/ and
http://xml.apache.org/commons/components/resolver/index.html. It
allows you to have the DTDs, schemas and included stylesheets at
another path than the documents mention as the system identifier or
URL. Catalogs map Public Identifiers (of DTDs) and the starting string
of URLs to actual paths. The Debian XML system is completely based on
it. It is not really easy to set up, but once done, it provides a
robust XML system.
I think we should do something about this. It
is unrealistic to expect Docbook users to write their own startup Java
file. They want something that works from the command line.
With my job, we use Ant build scripts for online PDF and HTML help
sites. Our technical writer rather easily works with the build.xml,
understands its contents pretty well and knows how to modify it when
needed. (She uses JEdit for editing the XML and to activate the build
scripts, but I have been thinking of having her try Eclipse because it
has better CVS functionality.)
IMHO document publishing has too many moving parts to remember
everything on the command-line. Also, there are many aspects common
(CSS stylesheets, FOP customization layer overrides, etc.) for
publishing multiple documents that can be factored out and shared in the
build script. As a bonus, Ant can also take care of other portions of
the publishing pipeline, such as FTP'ing the results to the website when
everything is done.
That is a rather professional solution. Lacking a good GUI, I would
like to see a simple command be sufficient to print a Docbook article
or book to say PDF. Well, on fop-dev it was just said that FOP's
command line 'fop -xml ... -xsl ... -pdf ...' now works for docbook
files with Xalan 2.7.0. That is a step forward. Still, no catalogs are
used.
See here for an effort towards a GUI for this kind of task:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=54378.
Unfortunately, the project has been discontinued.
Simon
--
Simon Pepping
home page: http://www.leverkruid.nl
-
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
