DOCBOOK-APPS: Problem generating slides (was Re: The slides doctype -XSL-FO output)

[Dan York <dyork at e-smith dot com>]

Rafael,

> Hello, has any more work been done recently on the slides doctype?  I'm
> still using version 1.1, current as of November last year. The regular
> HTML slides seem to work just fine for my purposes, but I have never been

I just started working with slides doctype yesterday as I have some slides
due for a talk (LinuxWorld SF on using CVS) and I just got fed up with
StarOffice (yes, I know about MagicPoint).  So I tried to give it a whirl...
but I was NOT able to generate HTML slides.

I installed Norm's 1.39 XSL stylesheets, and then downloaded the slides 1.1
doctype and tried to process the 'test.xml' file found in the directory.
First I found that I needed to modify line 10 of "xsl/slides.xsl" to have
the path to 'chunk.xsl':

<xsl:import href="/usr/share/sgml/docbook/xsl-stylesheets-1.39/html/chunk.xsl"/>

Once I did that, I tried again processing Norm's 'test.xml' using Xalan 1.2.2:

    [dyork@burrito slides]$ java org.apache.xalan.xslt.Process -IN test.xml
    -XSL xsl/slides.xsl
    ========= Parsing file:/local/home/dyork/db/slides/xsl/slides.xsl ==========
    Parse of file:/local/home/dyork/db/slides/xsl/slides.xsl took 8673 milliseconds
    ========= Parsing file:/local/home/dyork/db/slides/test.xml ==========
    Parse of file:/local/home/dyork/db/slides/test.xml took 878 milliseconds
    =============================
    Transforming...
    Writing frames.html for slides
    Writing toc.html for slides
    Writing titlefoil.html for slidesinfo
    XSL Error: pattern = '$prestitle'
    VariableReference given for variable out of context or without definition!
    Name = prestitle, source tree node: foil
    XPATH: pattern = '$prestitle'
    VariableReference given for variable out of context or without definition!
    Name = prestitle
    Xalan: was not successful.
    XSLProcessor: done
    [dyork@burrito slides]$

I did not make any modifications to 'test.xml' or any other file... I just
wanted to verify that it would build the test file before I started 
creating slides.  Have you been able to get it to work for you?

On a related note, do you (or anyone else) have examples of files using
the slides doctype that you would be willing to share?  I always find it
useful to look through other people's XML markup to understand better
how to use a DTD.  The only ones I could find for the Slides doctype is
the test.xml file that comes with it (which doesn't generate for me)

Thanks in advance,
Dan

-- 
Dan York, Director of Training        dyork@e-smith.com
Ph: +1-613-751-4401  Mobile: +1-613-263-4312 Fax: +1-613-564-7739 
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