Re: toolchain alternatives

[Neil Roeth <neil@debian.org>]

On Dec  2, Mark Johnson (mrj@debian.org) wrote:
 > On Wednesday, December 3, Zenaan Harkness wrote:
 > > Can someone with the knowledge please do a little ascii chart of the
 > > alternative toolchains for producing output from Docbook (can limit to
 > > XML)?
 > I will say that the xsl toolchains for producing ps/pdf are not yet
 > mature, but will meet most needs. OTOH, you can always use the DSSSL
 > stylesheets and the db2pdf, db2ps, etc., which are part of the
 > docbook-utils package (but you have to explicitly provide xml.dcl as
 > the default declaration). 
 > 
 > If you run unstable, you may find that the DSSSL print toolchain to be
 > broken since one of the essential components (jadetex) appears to be
 > uninstallable. [See bug #205922] 

I use the DSSSL toolchain in unstable for processing DocBook documents all the
time.  The above mentioned bug refers to versions of the progams in stable,
not unstable.  Can anyone confirm that there is a problem installing jadetex
in unstable?  I don't recall if I had to do anything special to get it to
work.

I use jade (or openjade), jadetex, dvips, dvipdf and w3m to create tex, dvi,
pdf, ps, html, txt and rtf output.  The chain goes like this:

xml -+- (jade/openjade) -> html - (w3m) -> txt
     |
     +- (jade/openjade) -> rtf
     |
     +- (jade/openjade) -> tex - (jadetex) -> dvi -+- (dvips) -> ps
                                                   |
                                                   +- (dvipdf) -> pdf

There is one thing that might sway you toward using the DSSSL toolchain.  I
looked for an XSL solution for creating RTF output, and found just one that
was no better than beta quality, at best.  That was about a year ago, when I
was looking for a new job, the source for my resume was in XML, and every
recruiter I talked to wanted it in MS Word format.  They had no problem
importing RTF, so I chose the DSSSL toolchain for that reason, and for its
maturity.

-- 
Neil Roeth