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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

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  • 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

    • 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) on 2003.01.29 12:49 (#16506) Journal
        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. FOP has been around for a while now, and is generally known to be buggy and not supporting a lot of the XSL-FO recommendation. (PassiveTex isn't perfect, but it is much closer for what it claims to cover.) There's supposed to be a big rewrite in progress that incorporates jfor (FO->RTF), supports more (all?) of the XSL-FO recommendation, and might support more inputs (SVG) and outputs (SVG, PS, etc.).

        As for OS X support, all of this can be installed via fink. (PassiveTex is a little trickier, and may not be directly supported with a fink package...)

        • 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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