Re: [DB2LaTeX-devel] Status of project, and where to next

[Nikolai P. <ni...@pr...>]

On Apr 22, 2005 at 07:48:05PM +0200, nico wrote:

> What is the docbook test suite you're talking about?  Is it the
> 'testdocs' entry under the docbook sourceforge site?

Exactly. I hasn't been "released" in a long time, but Norman Walsh seems
to update the CVS repository on a regular basis. Current version is for
Docbook 4.4. I think that this test suite is comprehensive enough to find
most "big" mistakes - at least I could verify that my table morerows code
needs rewriting badly.

> Besides, I am still interested in using your XSL table implementation.

It was rather a hack to be able to use db2latex-xsl at all for the Debian
project. Generally, I think the tables support should be rewritten.

> >So my opinion is that a lot of work needs to be done, especially in
> >ensuring flexibility and Docbook-compliance.
> If you have suggestions to improve flexibility, or even some hack,
> please tell it on the list. You can send all your wishes, at least to
> see the amount of work to do.

I don't think I've explored the code deeply enough to give qualified
reasons, but I didn't like the idea of "mapping", for example. I've got
the impession that it just replaces certain elements with certain
LaTeX-macros, which is not quite right, at least not without an obvious
way to overload this _consistently_ throughout the code.

But please note that I haven't read the code extensively and I cannot say
I understand all the background for this or that decision. 

> >Another field is ensuring TeX works the way we want it to (Unicode). If
> >we get clearance from the developers, we might need to setup an
> >automated test suite processing so that we can see which areas need
> >work.
> Good idea.

This is actually something I can setup rather quickly. I just need some
place to host it.

Another item on the agenda: I know you used Perl for post-processing. I'm
not quite sure it's sane enough, but I also can't tell you why we
shouldn't be doing that. I would like to have a plain XSL solution - or
else we can just take Perl and scrap XSLT. I know XSLT is PITA (I've spent
several days on the rather trivial task of adding morerows ;)), but if we
choose that way, we should walk along it.

Considering the structure of the project: a wiki might be good to store
all Docbook definitions, rendering proposals and possibly an algorithms
for translating that to LaTeX and of course some discussion.

I will hopefully be looking into db2latex-xsl's code soon, so I can tell
what I would like to see changed.

-- 
Nikolai Prokoschenko 
ni...@pr... / Jabber: pr...@ja...