Re: images in Docbook with Red Hat 6.2

[Eric Bischoff <ebisch at cybercable dot tm dot fr>]

Jochem Huhmann wrote:

> I didn't meant it this way. The wrapping shell-backend knows the target
> format and therefore it should know which file-type for images is the
> best for this target format. So it could pass this format (as in "png",
> "eps", "gif", ...) in a variable to jade and make it available in the
> stylesheet.

The stylesheet themselves have easy ways of determining the
backend with no help of any shell script (Sam's very first
message even shows how to do it in DSSSL).

But what happens if some pictures are PNG, others GIF,
others JPEG ?

> The stylesheet has the blank filename (from the SGML source) and the
> needed extension (from that variable) of the image-file then. This leads
> me to the assumption that this should be enough to build the right
> file-name (name + extension) in the stylesheet.

Again, there's no need of such a variable to know the
backend.

> It wouldn't be enough to make sure that the file in the needed format
> really exists, yes. But if it exists this could work. I haven't got the
> time right now to dig through the stylesheets to see how this could be
> done in a driver file and I may well have missed something important,
> though.

To summarize :

We have files that may be GIF, JPEG, PNG, EPS, ... :
	flower.jpeg, cactus.gif, flower.eps, cactus.eps
We have a selected backend (tex, pdf, html, ...) :
	html
We have a filename from the docbook document :
	flower

What would be nice if the stylesheet could say :

"Well, this is html so I can accept JPG, JPEG, GIF, and PNG.
The filename is "flower" so I should try "flower.jpg",
"flower.jpeg", "flower.gif" and "flower.png". Hmmm, only
"flower.jpeg" exists : I'll take it."

But this would assume we would have a way to know from DSSSL
whether a file exists or not. Norm said it was impossible.

-- 
 Éric Bischoff   -   mailto:ebisch@cybercable.tm.fr
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