Re: .pdf generation error using the "newer" tools

[Eric Bischoff <e dot bischoff at noos dot fr>]

"Alan W. Irwin" wrote:
> 
> Both the Cygnus DocBook packages and vanilla RedHat DocBook run on RedHat.
> But you have to clearly choose Cygnus or vanilla.  If you try both on RedHat
> they will interfere with each other.

This is an excellent reason for encouraging them to switch to the new
packages. They will get more powerful tools with more recent versions of
the DTD, Jadetex and the style sheets. Mandrake and Caldera already did
jump to the new versions. I've been told a port is currently happening
at Debian too.

> I don't want to get into a DocBook distribution war here, but my impression is the
> Cygnus tools are generally better than the vanilla RedHat ones.

What you call "vanilla RedHat DocBook" are the old Cygnus packages, the
ones that you do not find in new-trials/. Basically, Mark Galassi did
the old ones, I found them great, and started enhancing them. This all
sounds like schizophreny: RedHat hosts the DocBook-tools project, but
they don't include yet the newest versions in their own distribution
:-).

> For example,
> Cygnus is recommended to build the KDE documentation, and I have had more
> troubles with the vanilla version than the Cygnus version for my documentation
> project.

This is quite simple to explain. KDE's documentation project leader is
named Eric Bischoff. It's the same guy who attempts to perfect Mark
Galassi's scripts ;-). If you go to ftp://ftp.kde.org/pub/devel/docbook,
you will find exactly the same packages as in
ftp://sourceware.cygnus.com/pub/docbook-tools/new-trials.

> But to take advantage of Cygnus you have to get the latest version.  For
> example, there was an upgraded package today at
> ftp://sourceware.cygnus.com/pub/docbook-tools/new-trials/RPMS that Eric
> kindly prepared to fix another bug that I found.

(the problem with the ISO entities in XML - fixed since yesterday).

> The major problem with pdfjadetex hasn't been fixed yet, but Eric said on
> this list that it is on his ToDo list. He will have to delay looking at it
> until another higher priority project was completed, but I am willing to
> settle for that.

(higher priority being support for Japanese, Korean and Chinese in
printed output).

> Debian has a reliable DocBook system where pdfjadetex (and everything else
> for my documentation project) works reliably for me, but if you don't have
> access to Debian, I think you are going to have to wait to build your pdf
> documents on Cygnus (or else give the vanilla Redhat DocBook system a try to
> see if you can work around other problems there.) While waiting for pdf on
> Cygnus you can certainly validate your input by looking at html or
> postscript output.

I'm doing the documentation for Caldera and we need to send PDF to the
printing company. So be sure it will get fixed sooner or later :-).
Meanwhile, you can use ps2pdf as a workaround. Have you already tried?

-- 
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| Éric Bischoff                              mailto:e.bischoff@noos.fr |
| (Old address, in case of problems:  mailto:ebisch@cybercable.tm.fr)  |
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