[ANNOUNCE] docbook2X 0.8.7 release

Version 0.8.7 is out.

Change log: (also on the Web site)

 * Some stylistic improvements were made to the man-pages output.
   This includes fixing a bug that, in some cases, caused an extra blank
   line to occur after lists in man pages.
 * There is a new value utf-8//TRANSLIT for the --encoding option to
   db2x_manxml and db2x_texixml.
 * Added -m to utf8trans for modifying (a large number of) files in-place.
 * Added a section to the documentation discussing conversion performance.
   There is also a new test script, test/mass/test.pl that can exercise
   docbook2X by converting many documents at one time, with a focus on
   achieving the fastest conversion speed.
 * The documentation has also been improved in several places. Most
   notably, the docbook2X man page has been split into two much more
   detailed man pages explaining man-page conversion and Texinfo conversion
   separately, along with a reference of stylesheet parameters.
   The documentation has also been re-indexed (finally!)
   Also, due to an oversight, the last release omitted the stylesheet
   reference documentation. They are now included again.
 * Craig Ruff's patches were not integrated correctly in the last release;
   this has been fixed.
 * By popular demand, man-page conversion can also be done with XSLT alone
   — i.e. no Perl scripts or compiling required, just a XSLT processor.
   If you want to convert with pure XSLT, invoke the XSLT stylesheet in
   xslt/backend/db2x_manxml.xsl in lieu of the db2x_manxml Perl script.
 * Make the xmlcharmap2utf8trans script (convert XSLT 2.0 character maps to
   character maps in utf8trans format) really work.

Some plans for later release:

Automated testing of docbook2X is not as developed as I would like.
Right now, "testing" only consists of running the conversion
and then manually checking the final output in groff and info.
That's obviously unmanageable when you start having thousands of man pages.
But something like this might work:

 * validate Man-XML/Texi-XML output against the DTD
   (there are probably some validation errors now)
 * run against groff / makeinfo and check stderr from these tools
 * heuristics (for example,
   two blank lines in man pages probably indicate something wrong)

Also, I may just have to implement tables in XSLT, because I am starting
to get tired of those "table not supported" errors
when I run the automated tests...

--
Steve Cheng
鄭君博        http://gold-saucer.afraid.org


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