Transforming DocBook with dblatex

Benoit Guillon has released the 0.1.7 version of dblatex, a DocBook to PDF transform tool. This does require an existing Tex/LaTeX setup on your system. Why use this tool?

• The project is end-user oriented, that is it tries to hide as much as possible the latex compiling stuff by providing a single clean script to produce directly DVI, PostScript and PDF output.
• The actual output rendering is done not only by the XSL stylesheets transformation, but also by a dedicated LaTeX package. The purpose is to allow a deep LaTeX customisation without changing the XSL stylesheets.
• Post-processing is done by Perl, to make publication faster, and to parse things not so easily done by the XSL stylesheets like tables.

Here are the details on this release:

The dblatex 0.1.7 release is now available from http://dblatex.sf.net. It 
can be directly downloaded from this URL: 
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/dblatex/dblatex-0.1.7.tar.bz2?download

This release mainly includes the callout support for both verbatim and 
graphic elements, some other improvements, and bug fixes. The release is 
synchronized with the SF CVS repository, with the tag v0_1_7.

More precisely the changes included in this release are:

* Callout support:
 -  and  supported, even for external
   files.
 -  supported.

* Better  or  support:
 - External files (eg, in ) are handled.
 - literal.lines.showall parameter added, to remove the empty last
   lines, when set to 0. Set by default to 1.

* Legalnotices are printed in the native docbook style.

* An abstract in an article is printed.

* Better  support:
 -  to a list with a title is possible.
 -  to a refentry is possible.

* Other improvements:
 - term.breakline parameter added to have the  on a new
   line below the .
 - Hyphenation forced for text using a typewriter font. Moreover
   the font is smaller.
 - doc.publisher.show parameter added, to print the dblatex logo on
   the cover page.
 - doc.pdfcreator.show parameter added, to have DBLaTeX filled in
   the Creator field of the PDF information section.
 - Running dblatex on a root element different from article or book
   does not fail anymore, except for .

* Bug fixes:
 - dbk_table.sty: make \@xmultirow long.
 - sgml2xml.pl: empty textdata element handled.

See also: DocBook