Re: Status of project, and where to next

Oups, I forgot the list.

------- Forwarded message -------
From: nico <[email protected]>
To: "Nikolai Prokoschenko" <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [DB2LaTeX-devel] Status of project, and where to next
Date: Fri, 22 Apr 2005 19:44:44 +0200

On Fri, 22 Apr 2005 09:44:55 +0200, Nikolai Prokoschenko
<[email protected]> wrote:

> 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 =
=20
>> now?
>
> I'm not a developer of DB2LaTeX-XSL, but I'm very interested in it, as =
=20
> I'm
> trying to get the Debian Project's Documentation (at the moment only th=
e
> 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 t=
he
> morerows property of tables to the extent we needed, but it's still not
> really good.

Hello,

I've done a db2latex clone (http://dblatex.sf.net) some time ago that
started with the db2latex stylesheets. Maybe some of the rewritten
stylesheets could be reused, especialy those to render the graphics.
Anyway, this thread is a good occasion to list what is missing, what
should change, etc. What is the docbook test suite you're talking about?
Is it the 'testdocs' entry under the docbook sourceforge site? Besides, I
am still interested in using your XSL table implementation.

> 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 =20
> free
> fonts).
>
> So my opinion is that a lot of work needs to be done, especially in
> ensuring flexibility and Docbook-compliance.

If you have suggestions to improve flexibility, or even some hack, please
tell it on the list. You can send all your wishes, at least to see the
amount of work to do.

> 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 s=
o
> that we can see which areas need work.

Good idea.

Bye,
BG



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