From: Steven Jenkins <steven.jenkins@...>
Date: 2005-11-12T10:27:16+09:00
Subject: Re: DocBook to PDF

Hal Fulton wrote:
> I'm wanting to do some docbook to pdf conversion.
> 
> I assume the "right" way would be some combination
> of REXML and PDF::Writer.
> 
> Anyone done anything like this?

I have Ruby code that converts a usable subset of DocBook to LaTeX. It's 
a prototype, but it works. It'd be pretty easy to extend it for elements 
it doesn't handle, modulo difficult things like bibliographic references 
and citations.

> Ideally I'd like to be able to tweak a few things
> such as margins and page size without changing
> anything else...

All that's in a separate style file.

I developed this for a specific application: producing formal 
specification documents by extracting functional models and requirements 
from a database. I turn the XML into HTML with XSLT and into PDF using 
LaTeX and dvipdf.

I'll find the latest version tonight and email it to you. If it's 
useful, maybe I'll put it on Rubyforge.

Steve