From: Hal Fulton <hal9000@...>
Date: 2005-11-13T03:56:09+09:00
Subject: Re: DocBook to PDF

Bob Hutchison wrote:
> 
> 
> My first thought is Holy Crap! Really, I've got a kid about that age :-)

Huh? Smiley or not, I don't get this remark. And I so hate to be
humor-impaired.  ;)

> The typical XML way to do this is DocBook -> XSL:FO -> pdf because  
> you'll be able to use Norm Walsh's stuff. If you do this and you have  
> input documents bigger than, say, two pages, you'll be wanting the  
> *fastest* XML processors you can get. 

This sounds similar ot others' advice, so I will be looking into it.

As for speed, I do have a large doc -- 200 pages or so -- but as I
will only reformat it once or twice, I'm not sure I care much
about speed. Unless it's a "cyclic" thing where I have to tweak it
and look at the results and tweak again.

> Are you committed to DocBook? If not you should have a look at DITA  
> (from IBM), and consider latex/contex or one of the groff macro  
> packages (like om (mom)). I'm having some fun with publicon from  
> Wolfram these days (it reminds me of FrameMaker but runs on OS/X (and  
> Windows, linux coming, maybe) and can generate HTML, XML, and latex  
> output). If publicon works out (I'm using it to document a ruby  project 
> I'll be open sourcing soon, and a couple of things for work)  I'll be 
> sticking with that.

For this particular project, the source is in DocBook. It's been
transformed into other forms -- RTF, PDF, TeX, HTML.

There might be other ways to do this -- all I really want is to
change the page size (and possibly margins) and re-flow. But the
original source is DocBook.


Thanks,
Hal