Re: Thanks re docbook to ePub3

Hi Philo,

So the problem which remains is that the XHTML docs from the generated 
EPUB archive have the image reference looking like this:

<img src="image.jpg" width="50%"/>

right? Does this way of specifying the proportional width work with the 
EPUB reader? So is it only a problem of validation errors reported by 
the epub checker but actually the EPUB reader interprets the 
proportional width correctly?

Probably the image width would need to be specified like this in the 
XHTML output:

<img src="image.jpg" style="width: 50%; height: 50%"/>

The DocBook publishing is based on XSLT stylesheets, there is an XSLT 
stylesheet named "graphics.xsl" located in the Oxygen installation here:

> OXYGEN_INSTALL_DIR/frameworks/docbook/xsl/xhtml/graphics.xsl
with a template named:

> <xsl:template name="process.image.attributes">
which could probably be overwritten with a Docbook customization to 
produce a @style attribute instead of directly the @width attribute.

Maybe you can start a different thread for the double numbers in the PDF 
output and attach a small DocBook sample to reproduce the problem.

Regards,

Radu

Radu Coravu
Oxygen XML Editor

On 3/25/21 04:45, Philo Calhoun wrote:
> Thank you Robert and Richard for your suggestions:
>
> The color issue was solved using your  suggestion:
>
> <para><phraserole="red">Step 1:</phrase> Description of Step 1 etc. 
> </para>,
> and editing the docbook-epub.css.xml file in Oxygen XML to include:
>
> span.red {
>   color: rgb(200,0,0);
>   font-weight: bold;
> }
>
> However, the issue of image scaling seems more problematic, as I have 
> different % scaling of different images within a single topic (from 
> 25% to 100%). The only way I can see to make this work is to have the 
> conversion add some sub style of img, like img.half img.quarter etc. 
> and I’m not sure how to do it in docbook. I can edit the ePub in Sigil 
> and add that sub style of img, but I then have to add the designation 
> for each and every image file, and that is a lot of work.
>
> I am also having issues with pdf output of cross-references. They work 
> fine in ePub but generate double numbers in pdf. I’m fairly new to 
> Oxygen XML and docbook, and understand I need to brush up on the 
> conversion algorithms.
>
> I am not using the docbook bibliography designation, as it seems 
> pretty complicated for the mixed types of references (web links, books 
> journals, etc.). So I have the bibiography as a section and designate 
> the entries like:
>
> <listitem>
> <paraxml:id=“Smith01”>Smith, J. This is my title. Scientific Journal 
> 2021; 37(4):435-438. </para>
> </listitem>
>
> And cross reference like:
> [<linklinkend=“Smith01"/>]
>
> As a background, I have a couple of books that need to be in both pdf 
> and ePub outputs and have a lot of cross-references, tables, figures, 
> and mathematical formulas. I’ve used InDesign and Framemaker for them 
> in the past, but migrated to MadCap Flare. Unfortunately, while Flare 
> creates beautiful web output, its pdf and ePub outputs are buggy and 
> limited. This is particularly so with mathematical formulas and fine 
> tuning of the table of contents. I get about 95% of the way there, but 
> have to do a lot of creative workarounds due to problems/bugs with 
> Flare. Due to this frustration, I now publish the print version using 
> LaTeX, which works perfectly, but getting precise ePub output without 
> a lot of carryover junk code (the way Flare does) has been much easier 
> in Oxygen than in Flare. At this point, I still am having to do a fair 
> amount of precise formatting of the Oxygen generated ePub in Sigil. (I 
> tried Jutoh, but it corrupts MathML code unfortunately.) My goal is to 
> get both a clean output and specific image formatting for ePub 
> directly from OxygenXML. The extra level of structure using XML vs 
> XHTML is a huge benefit when it comes to crossreferencing and 
> maintaining consistent formatting.
>
> Thanks again,
> Philo
>