hgbook build

[Dominik Psenner]

It's not a rendering, but a plain font integration problem. I'm not contrary
to latex, but I don't see a real advantage of latex over fo and I'll try to
explain my reasons:

Using a latex driven toolchain over docbook adds only further redundant
complexity for things that can be accomplished directly with docbook/fo.

Surely docbook has its main drawback in its need for a good fo renderer,
which can be either a commercial one or the "free" fop implementation built
on top of java. Thus fop works great on a large amount of systems as it
relies only on a working JRE to run, which is also one of main reasons why
it was written in java. But is that really reason enough for the huge
efforts to maintain a latex toolchain?

Finally, docbook can be rendered to latex and whoever needs it, can render
the latex result to pdf but the font problems will just move from fop over
to latex which is not a solution.

JMTC
 
Greetings,
D.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: mercurial-devel-bounces at selenic.com [mailto:mercurial-devel-
> bounces at selenic.com] On Behalf Of Faheem Mitha
> Sent: Wednesday, March 16, 2011 8:02 AM
> To: Dongsheng Song
> Cc: mercurial-devel at selenic.com
> Subject: Re: hgbook build
> 
> 
> 
> On Tue, 15 Mar 2011, Dongsheng Song wrote:
> 
> > If you post error message of 'make html LINGUA=en', I can give you some
> help.
> > I do not think you have problems after you install dot and inkscape.
> 
> I can generate the en version both with Apache/Java/FOP and with dblatex.
> I was having problems with the fr version with dblatex - if dblatex works
> I would rather use that. I'm sure the problem is not with the
> dependencies.
> 
> The problem (which is common between the FOP and dblatex approach to PDF
> generation) is that sometimes the example scripts (or whatever they are
> called) that generate some of the figures, error out. Not sure why.
> 
> >> As you are one of the authors of the Chinese translation, do you know
> why
> >> the gkai fonts don't work? Are the cyberbit fonts required? BTW, this
> is my
> >> ignorance speaking, but since there are multiple Chinese languages,
> which
> >> one is being used here?
> >>                                                          Regards,
> Faheem
> >>
> >
> > Please blame dblatex why it can not use gbsn/gaki font or uming/ukai
> font.
> >
> > Font uming (general used for body) and ukai (general used for title)
> include
> > almost all Chinese glyphs.
> >
> > 1) dblatex generate invalid font reference
> > ~/vcs/hg/hgbook/build/zh/source$ dblatex -t tex -P latex.encoding=utf8
> > hgbook.xml
> > ~/vcs/hg/hgbook/build/zh/source$ less hgbook.tex
> 
> [snip]
> 
> > 2) If I update font reference
> 
> [snip]
> 
> > Then I can generate valid pdf file output:
> > ~/vcs/hg/hgbook/build/zh/source$ xelatex hgbook.tex
> >
> > https://bitbucket.org/dongsheng/hgbook/downloads
> > https://bitbucket.org/dongsheng/hgbook/downloads/hgbook-zh-dblatex-
> 20100511.pdf
> >
> > But the pdf output quality is very very poor, e.g. line size are
> > incorrect, lots of text out of line, etc.
> > There have very very long way for dblatex used for CJK output.
> 
> Ok. I don't understand the issues with the Chinese translation, but maybe
> it is worth submitting a bug report? In any case, do you agree using
> dblatex (or some other simple thing) is reasonable for the other languages
> like en for which it works correctly?
> 
>                                                             Regards,
> Faheem