Re: Status of project, and where to next

On Apr 21, 2005 at 11:24:48AM +0200, Lauri Watts wrote:

> What we'd like to know is, what is the status of the project as it is now?

I'm not a developer of DB2LaTeX-XSL, but I'm very interested in it, as I'm
trying to get the Debian Project's Documentation (at the moment only the
Debian Installer Manual) to look clean and nice. I've found out that
db2latex-xsl is rather good for our goals, but it should be rehauled at
some places because these are not yet DocBook-compliant - it also fails
the Docbook Test Suite miserably. I've managed to patch it to support the
morerows property of tables to the extent we needed, but it's still not
really good.

Another problem is that the documentation we have comes in several
languages and also several scripts. The TeX/LaTeX support for these
differs significantly and sometimes DB2LaTeX is not flexible enough to
support all necessary steps. For example, I couldn't generate proper
Japanese without converting from UTF-8 to legacy Japanese (using only free
fonts).

So my opinion is that a lot of work needs to be done, especially in
ensuring flexibility and Docbook-compliance. Another field is ensuring TeX
works the way we want it to (Unicode). If we get clearance from the
developers, we might need to setup an automated test suite processing so
that we can see which areas need work. 

I'm lurking in this mailing list, if anything big happens, I'd be glad to
help. I do not consider myself capable of managing the project alone, but
I'd like to see it evolve into a general documentation typesetting
solution, as opposed to FOP and JadeTeX (which is plain ugly and
non-flexible).

-- 
Nikolai Prokoschenko 
[email protected] / Jabber: [email protected]


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