I tried to send this text to the docbook-apps mailing list at lists.oasis-open.org, but it only accept messages from subscribers and rejected my post, and I completely lack the bandwidth required to subscribe to another mailing list, so instead I try to post my message here and hope my blog readers can help me out.
I am quite new to docbook processing, and am climbing a steep learning curve at the moment.
To give you some background, I am working on a Norwegian translation of the book Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig, and I use docbook to handle the process. The files to build the book are available from github. The book got around 400 pages with parts, images, footnotes, tables, index entries etc, which has proven to be a challenge for the free software docbook processors. My build platform is Debian GNU/Linux Squeeze.
I want to build PDF, EPUB and HTML version of the book, and have tried different tool chains to do the conversion from docbook to these formats. I am currently focusing on the PDF version, and have a few problems.
- Using dblatex, the <part> handling is not the way I want to, as </part> do not really end the <part>. (See BTS report #683166), the xetex backend (needed to process UTF-8) give incorrect hyphens in index references spanning several pages (See BTS report #682901), and I am unable to get the norwegian template texts (See BTS report #682936).
- Using straight xmlto fail with some latex error (See BTS report #683163).
- Using xmlto with the fop backend fail to handle images (do not show up in the PDF), fail to handle a long footnote (overlap footnote and text body, see BTS report #683197), and fail to create a correct index (some lack page ref, and the page refs listed are not right).
- Using xmlto with the dblatex backend behave like dblatex.
- Using docbook-xls with xsltproc + fop have the same footnote and index problems the xmlto + fop processing.
So I wonder, what would be the best way to create the PDF version of this book? Are some of the bugs found above solved in new or experimental versions of some docbook tool chain?
What about HTML and EPUB versions?