From: Devin Mullins <twifkak@...>
Date: 2005-11-13T04:32:11+09:00
Subject: Re: DocBook to PDF

Devin Mullins wrote:

> Hal Fulton wrote:
>
>> Keith Fahlgren wrote:
>>
>>> On Sat, 12 Nov 2005, Hal Fulton wrote:
>>>
>>> Does this need to be a pure Ruby solution? If not, I'd suggest using 
>>> (or adapting) the standard DocBook stylesheets 
>>> (http://wiki.docbook.org/topic/DocBookXslStylesheets), and using
>>> (perhaps via the Ruby libxslt bindings) those to generate XSL-FO, 
>>> which you can
>>> then feed into FOP (http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/) or the FO 
>>> formatter
>>> of your choice.
>>
>> That sounds tedious and error-prone to me -- I don't normally use any
>> of this stuff. And I don't even know what FO is.
>
> XSL-FO is a W3C standard, a product of the XSL working group (the same 
> people who put out XSLT, the language for converting XML documents). 
> XSL-FO is an intermediary XML language for represented "formatted 
> objects" (rich text documents). Many tools exist to convert XSL-FO 
> files (documents) into PDF, PNG, etc. Apache FOP is the popular Java 
> one, but you don't need to know Java to use it. It has a command line 
> interface whereby you feed it the filename of an XSL-FO file and the 
> filename of your desired PDF file.

To drill it in:

DocBook --(XSLT)--> XSL-FO --(FOP)--> PDF

The XSLT pictured is a specific XSLT stylesheet for converting DocBook 
to XSL-FO. XSLT is a general XML language specification for XML file 
conversion, as specified before, and according to Keith, there exists a 
specific XSLT "script" for DocBook --> XSL-FO. You will need an XSLT 
"interpreter" to run it. Xalan is one. (Google it.)

FOP is FOP. It needs no specific thing. XSL-FO and PDF are both fairly 
standard.

Devin