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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

    • Agreed -- I also wasted time trying to get the broken sh script to work, only to be rewarded by the ubiquitous Java stack trace. I must admit that I've never seen the draw of Java + XML, though.

      • I must admit that I've never seen the draw of Java + XML, though.
        Then you must not remember Scott McNealy's pronouncement of ca. 1999: «XML gives Java something to do!» :-)

      • Java + XML quite simply doesn't fly. You can do it for sure, but it really wasn't made to handle XML's flexibility gracefully. To be honest, the worst part of going from a Perl job to a job in which I occasionally do some Java is the XML support. No good SAX writer, no good parsing framework (JAXP is pretty much a joke), no trace of a proper SAX pipelining framework, no viable XPath on streams, no variety in tree implementations. It's appalling.

        Only two languages have proper XML support, Perl and P

        --

        -- Robin Berjon [berjon.com]

    • 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

      • 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

        • 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.

    • Bah, who cares if DocBook has tools? Even with the best tools it's still the Ugliest XML Vocabulary Ever (ducks)!.

      --

      -- Robin Berjon [berjon.com]

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