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XML to PDF
- To: docbook at lists dot oasis-open dot org
- Subject: DOCBOOK: XML to PDF
- From: Shawn Willden <shawn at willden dot org>
- Date: Tue, 25 Sep 2001 14:01:55 -0600
- List-Id: <docbook.lists.oasis-open.org>
I have some XML documents that I want to transform into PDF files (among
other formats). I have written an XSLT stylesheet that transforms them
into DocBook, since that seems like a very nice intermediate format that
I can use to produce a wide variety of outputs.
I had thought that a process like the following would work:
XML(my DTD) -> XML (DocBook) -> XML (FO) -> PDF
Using XT and appropriate XSLT stylesheets for the first two translations
and the Apache FOP tool for the third.
However, I'm having a hard time because the XSL tools don't seem to work
(particularly FOP, plus I get some odd errors when applying Norman
Walsh's XSLT stylesheets to translate to FO). So, I looked into using
the SGML tools instead, using the DSSSL stylesheets. However, Jade
doesn't like taking my XML as input (for example, it doesn't like <TOC/>).
Are there some other options? Is what I'm trying to do known to work?
BTW, the DocBook structure I'm using is a <book> with a set of
<reference>s, each with a set of <refentry>s. I could easily use
articles or sections instead, and in fact I'm thinking that that's a
better choice. I'm building documentation for Use Case models. I
defined a DTD (which I'm going to rework as a pure extension to XMI)
that includes all of the typical elements, like actors, goals, use
cases, etc., and provides a very nice way to structure use cases. I've
also already built an XSLT stylesheet that transforms my Use Case models
into nice, thoroughly hyperlinked HTML with a TOC, etc. It would be
useful to get them in PDF format as well, and maybe others, someday.
DocBook seems almost ideal: I can create a number of stylesheets that
present the Use Cases in structurally different views, all of them in
DocBook format, and then DocBook tools can be used to transform the
different views into a wide variety of actual document formats for
distribution to end-users.
Thanks for any assistance or recommendations (including pointers to
different, potentially more appropriate fora),
Shawn.
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