Re: docbook2pdf

[Ming Hua <minghua@rice.edu>]

On Mon, Jun 14, 2004 at 09:18:39AM +0200, Marco Lenhardt wrote:
> Hi
> 
> I am trying to convert a chinese documentation in docbook xml format 
> to html and pdf via docbook2[html,pdf] (on a woody box).
> 
> docbook2html works fine for me. The generated output contains browser 
> readable chinese characters.
> 
> But the docbook2pdf output has no (readable) chinese characters. They 
> look like <27888><26862><25380>.
> 
> I think docbook2pdf's toolchain contains tex, which can not handle 
> utf-8 coded characters.
> 
> Can anyone tell me a way to convert chinese text to pdf.

Hi Marco,

I have no experience on docbook xml, but I think the following
information may be useful to you.

The Debian reference project (qref.sourceforge.net) now successfully
generate both HTML and PDF (also with plain text, postscript) format of
Chinese documents form a single sgml source.  The format they use is
debiandoc sgml, so I am afraid that's quite different from docbook sgml.
And also, IIRC, they use some Debian specific tool to convert sgml to
latex first, then generate postscript and pdf files.

And there were some hacks to make the generated latex files works well
with cjk-latex, the hacks are done by a programmer from Taiwan, and was
on Traditional Chinese first, but ported to Simplified Chinese later.
Also, the whole system require Debian sid.

I didn't know the details and sorry I can't give you more specific
reference at the moment.  You can look into the project's CVS and you
should find the script in tool/ or bin/ directory (can't remember
clearly, sorry).  The main problem, from my limited experience with
cjk-latex, is that cjk-latex requires all Chinese texts to be in a
special enviroment to be treated correctly, and most of the latex
auto-generating tools are simply not aware of cjk-latex.

Hope this helps and good luck,
Ming
2004.06.16

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