use Perl

• DocBook-X (Score:2)

  by ziggy (25)

  I found DocBook-X, a strange little combination of tools to emit PDF from DocBook source.

  What an utter piece of crap.

  This package is the worst of what open source is about. This is a 16MB download of poorly documented and highly buggy software. Thankfully, it's mostly shell scripts, but completely untested shell scripts (docbook-sh.cfg is a slightly warmed over csh shell script that doesn't work; multiple bugs in docbook2pdf took a while to spot before it led to a few hundred lines of Java exceptio
  • Re:DocBook-X (Score:2)

    by gnat (29)

    How weird, it worked out of the box for me. I even wrote a crude translator for Project Gutenberg books to turn them into DocBook articles and successfully translated a couple.

    So if this is the worst of open source and DocBook, where are the good DocBook tools for OS X?

    --Nat
    • Re:DocBook-X (Score:2)

      by ziggy (25)

      So if this is the worst of open source and DocBook, where are the good DocBook tools for OS X?

      This was the worst of open source: a big download that wasn't debugged, was poorly documented, and didn't work.

      The "good docbook tools for OS X" that I use are the same ones I've been using for years on Linux, FreeBSD and Win*: xsltproc (from libxslt), DocBook-XSLT, openjade, DocBook-DSSSL, and the XML/SGML DTDs. Converting DocBook to PDF directly has always been tricky, and the best paths involve using TeX
      • Re:DocBook-X (Score:1)

        by jmm (276) <johnNO@SPAMperlwolf.com> on 2003.01.30 13:29 (#16545) Journal

        This was the worst of open source: a big download that wasn't debugged, was poorly documented, and didn't work.

        And those characteristics differ from a release 1.0 from MicroSoft (any product) in what way?

        Oh, I get it - for open source, this is the worst possible, rather than the standard.

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