From: Nicholas Van Weerdenburg <vanweerd@...>
Date: 2005-11-13T12:42:48+09:00
Subject: Re: DocBook to PDF

On 11/12/05, Hal Fulton <hal9000@hypermetrics.com> 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.
>
> > Alternately, OpenOffice.org can open (and reasonably) format DocBook
> > files, and has a built-in PDF printer, and is scriptable via Ruby (though I
> > wouldn't necessarily recommend it).
>
> There doesn't really *need* to be any scripting necessarily. I just want
> to be able to reformat the doc in a couple of different ways.
>
> My OOo, however, doesn't seem to know DocBook. It's probably old (1.1.0) --
> what is the newest one? Or is this some separate plugin?
>
>
> Thanks,
> Hal
>
>
>

It's a bit tedious to install, but the toolchain is mostly automatic.

docbook->doc book xsl-> xsl-fo-> pdf

All you reall do is execute the toolchain against the docbook. So, you
don't really need to know xslt, xsl-fo, or pdf.

Compared to Rexml and PDF::Writer, this is a whole lot simpler. Spend
a couple of hours configuring tools, create a batch file or ant
script, and you are rolling.

Sun had created an Ant tool called pipeline for handling processes
much like this. When I looked at it was mostly a concept. Not sure
where it went.

Interestingly, xsl-fo was the first concept behind xslt
(t=transformations) which is used to mangle xml docs from one format
to another. During the production of "xsl" they need to general
transformations became apparent, so they split xsl into xsl-t
(transformations) and xsl-fo (formatting objects). Now everyone uses
xslt and xsl-fo is languishing in near obscurity, even though it was
the initial impetus behind the whole xsl thing.

Regards,
Nick
--
Nicholas Van Weerdenburg