[DB2LaTeX-devel] Linebreaks in paragraphs and character entities

[bvh <bvh...@ir...>]

Hi,

I am interested in docbook->latex conversion. I wrote a simple C++ program for
that (naartex). Unfortunatly only after I first published it someone
pointed to db2latex.

Now I am trying to use db2latex instead because it is much more mature than
my first rudimentary conversion and it would save me a lot of time if I could
use something existing instead of brewing my own solution. (I've to use this
in a commercial project, so) However I've run in 3 small issues. 

1. Use of character entities

The documents I have to translate use character and entity references for
special characters like accents, the euro symbol and many more.

Entity references in the latin1 set like (à etc) are converted to
latin1 encoding by db2latex (I believe?) I know about the latinenc package
to solve this problem, but what about characters outside that set? Are there
other LaTeX packages I need to use?

Character entities like € (I believe this to be the euro symbol) are
left alone by db2latex. Again the problem is that (my installation of) LaTeX
doesn't know how to handle these. What should I do to get that working?

The FAQ mentions this but it is not fully clear for me how to solve the
character entity references (with the numerical form)

2. Line breaks in paragraphs

My documents sometimes contain things like this

<para>
This is

one paragraph
</para>

I believe the intent is to render this as one single paragraph. However when
I convert to LaTeX with db2latex the single white line is still there
and becomes a hard line break in the typeset document.

3. We have documents where the scaling factor for the imagedata has a fraction.
This didn't work with db2latex. However when rereading the docbook specification
before posting I saw that the scaling factor must be an integer so I'll have
to change those sources then.

Thanks for taking your time in replying and developing db2latex.

cu bart

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