Re: PDF output of the docs

[Malcolm Tredinnick <malcolm commsecure com au>]

On Fri, 2003-07-11 at 05:43, Adrian Custer wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> I gather that for postscript/pdf output we need to have the images in
> different format. Does .eps work for both?

This probably depends on how you are converting from DocBook to
postscript or pdf. What are using to do this?

> Also, do the <mediaobjects> need to have a separte field for both png
> and eps or is there some hack, like not specifying the format, that
> makes the conversion tool pick the apporpriate format?

A mediaobject element can contain multiple imageobject elements. Each
imageobject element contains an imagedata element and you can specify
the format attribute on the latter. So something like the following
(taken from a real document I had lying around, so I know it works).

 <mediaobject>
   <imageobject role="html">
      <imagedata width="661" depth="574" format="PNG" align="center"
                 fileref="acc-overview.png"/>
   </imageobject>
   <imageobject role="fo">
      <imagedata width="397pt" depth="348pt" format="EPS"
                 align="center" fileref="acc-overview.eps"/>
   </imageobject>
 </mediaobject>

The role="XX" bits are hints to the Norm Walsh DocBook stylesheets so
that it will select the right format for the output mode (HTML or FO
output). I cannot remember when the role attribute on imageobjects was
respected by the stylesheets.

> What tools enable conversion to pdf? The web site talks about cygnus
> tools (link broken) and img2eps (link broken). I'll probably use gimp to
> save in both png and eps but what tools go from xml to ps or to pdf?

You can use PassiveTeX to try and produce PDF output from DocBook-XML.
It's probably easiest to use this via Tim Wagh's xmlto package (possibly
already installed on your system, if not, see 
http://cyberelk.net/tim/xmlto/index.html). I am not overly impressed
with the output of PassiveTeX -- I seem to always be hitting bugs, but
then again I put a bit of stress on DocBook and the stylesheets, so
simple documents may proceed more smoothly. There is also xmlroff
(http://xmlroff.sourceforge.net/) which is still on my list of things to
try, but continues to look promising.

Other people may have other alternatives to try.

I must admit that these days I tend to just produce HTML and write
detailed CSS files so that I have a good print stylesheet. However, I
also have a few small additions to the standard Norm Walsh XSLT
stylsheets to assist me with that (e.g. passing the "role" attribute
through in a few extra cases), so it didn't just work "out of the box".

Cheers,
Malcolm