Re: DOCBOOK-APPS: trying to use "xmlto" in red hat to customize PDFoutput

["Robert P. J. Day" <rpjday at mindspring dot com>]

On Tue, 4 Mar 2003, Tim Waugh wrote:

> On Tue, Mar 04, 2003 at 05:48:11AM -0500, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> 
> > and add it to the xmlto command with "-m", it has no effect.
> > is this because it's not an xsl:param, but an xsl:attribute-set?
> 
> The xmlto program doesn't interpret the fragments at all, just builds
> a temporary stylesheet file which includes all the fragments.
> 
> If you comment out the 'trap' line in /usr/bin/xmlto and run it with
> -v it will tell you the names of the temporary files it creates, and
> won't remove them at exit.

the temporary stylesheet looks fine -- an xsl:import and some
xsl:includes.  what's baffling me is that docbook markup that
rendered beautifully in HTML renders untelligibly or causes
the rendering to fail when trying to generate PDF.

some of the problems:

1) things which are types of lists fail to generate PDF at all
   if that list will be broken over a page (which is why i'm
   trying so hard to generate page breaks).  at least, that
   *seems* to be the problem since changing the contents of the
   document to shift the position of the list fixes the problem.

2) simple two-column tables aren't rendered in the PDF output at all

3) neither vertical or horizontal simple lists are rendered
   properly -- they appear as overstruck -- but inline simple
   lists look fine.

like i mentioned, i'm confused that simple docbook markup that
generated perfect HTML generates junk PDF or doesn't generate
anything.  puzzling.

rday