From: Tobias Reif <tobiasreif@...>
Date: 2002-01-28T19:00:48+09:00
Subject: Re: OT: tools for creating documentation

Dave Thomas wrote:

> To do that, you have to add and remove
> little bits of vertical space: make interparagraph spaces slightly
> stretchier here, slightly tighter there, change the spacing in tables,
> shrink figures a bit and so on. In LaTeX that's fairly easy: I have a
> set of layout macros which I can turn on and off, and I manually
> insert them during the final weeks of the project. In DocBook though,
> I don't think I'd have a way of expressing that kind of control, and
> that would be a shame.


Isn't that because Docbook is semantic markup, and no layout markup?


I tried Docbook -> XSLFO -> PDF.


Not bad, but to get custom layout, the Docbook2XSLFO XSLTs need to be 
cutomized, and since Docbook is pretty large, that's a lot of work.

Perhaps defining a subset of Docbook, plus adding semantic custom stuff 
in a personal namsespace would help then.

Anyways, the XSLFO2PDF conersion also can have it's quirks, so whenever 
possible, I use XHTML. But that's probably not appropriate for most books.

Tobi



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