Tuesday, May 30, 2006
Sunday, May 28, 2006
Star Wars Weekends!
When we were invited to go to DisneyWorld with some friends, we didn't realize it would be during two of the Star Wars Weekends at MGM! Here's a cool Sandtrooper that was on patrol on Mickey Avenue...
Categories: Sci-Fi
Friday, May 26, 2006
DocSwag!
Norm Walsh has set up a storefront for DocBook swag! Just t-shirts, buttons and a bumpersticker for now. Since caffeine consumption is a staple of technical writers, I'd like to request coffee mugs be added to the product list! I think mouse pads would also be an essential!
Get your DocSwag now at http://www.cafepress.com/dbswag!
Categories: DocSwag
DocBook XSL 1.70.1 released
OK, now it's official. The latest version of the DocBook XSL (1.70.1) has been released.
You can download the latest stylesheets at: http://sourceforge.net/projects/docbook, and you can view the release notes at: http://docbook.sourceforge.net/release/xsl/current/RELEASE-NOTES.html
Now go forth and DocBook with style! :-)
Categories: General
Thursday, May 25, 2006
IPBuddys: a new eComic!
My son, Connor, has created a pretty cool comic series about two computers in the networked world. The computers? Right now, a PC laptop and an iMac. Perhaps at some point he can add our old Pentium II-266 tower and 486 desktop!
Originally, he wanted to call it "Saturday.COM", but that name is currently taken, even though that URL doesn't seem to respond. I tried to help him come up with a new name, and eventually settled on "IPBuddys".
He's publishing on Blogger for now. If you have any suggestions of a better place to publish a comic, send me a comment!
You can view IPBuddys at: http://www.ipbuddys.com. What an amazing time we live in, where even an 8-year-old can share his creativity with the world!
Congratulations, Delta IV team!
Congratulations to the Boeing Delta IV team on the successful launch of the GOES-N mission yesterday! I've been fortunate to work with many of the folks on this team, and understand the amount of work and coordination involved in making this a success. Great job!
I was fortunate to see this rocket on the pad several times over the past year. Very cool stuff! I'm glad the Delta IV made the journey as intended, and that the GOES-N payload will help meteorologists in a big way.
Categories: Space
Tuesday, May 23, 2006
Migrating from Interchange to Import/Export
I was trying to upgrade or convert some old Arbortext Interchange import templates to the new Arbortext Import/Export map templates. I searched high and low for this documentation, to no avail (even with Google Desktop!). Eventually I resorted to a support ticket with PTC. To save everyone else some time and trouble, here's the official response:
Instructions for migrating from Interchange to Import/Export can be found on page 216 of the Customizer's Guide(page 228 in the PDF Reader).
And just to be a little more clear, that doc should be in your docs directory (C:\Program Files\Arbortext\Editor\docs\customizing_guide.pdf)
Wednesday, May 17, 2006
DocBook XSL 1.70 released!
It's been a while since the last release of the DocBook stylesheets, but there have been quite a number of improvements and fixes! Michael Smith has announced the availability of Version 1.70.0 of the DocBook XSL stylesheets.
You can download the latest stylesheets at: http://sourceforge.net/projects/docbook, and you can view the release notes at: http://docbook.sourceforge.net/release/xsl/current/RELEASE-NOTES.html
Key improvements include:
- support for FOP 0.9
- support for Xalan 2.7
- support for DocBook v5 docs
- many new parameters for FO, HTML and manpage outputs
- additions of WordML stylesheets
This is the initial experimental release, so please test and send feedback to the docbook-apps list! The final version 1.70.1 will be released following the short review and test period.
Categories: DocBook
Tuesday, May 16, 2006
Updated "DocBook V5.0 The Transition Guide"
Dick Hamilton has added a new section about creating customized versions of DocBook V5 grammar. This doc is a great reference for migrating content from earlier versions of the DocBook standard.
You can find the latest version here: http://www.docbook.org/docs/howto/
Categories: DocBook
Thursday, May 04, 2006
A little inline SVG...
I created this graphic for some training I created, and thought I'd try embedding it directly in a blog entry:
Unfortunately, it looks like something is getting messed up on the Blogger side. A working example of inline SVG can be found here: http://jwatt.org/svg/demos/xhtml-with-inline-svg.xhtml. It looks like Blogger pages are served as text/html, not application/xhtml+xml, even though the post editor enforces that your content is well-formed! Hopefully there will be a way to change the blog settings so I can do inline SVG in the near future.
Categories: XML
Star Wars Lego II trailer!
StarWars.com and LucasArts have released the trailer for the new Star Wars Lego II video game! You can view it at: http://download.lucasarts.com/legoswii_480.mov
The original Star Wars Lego game is a ton of fun, and my kids and I played the game together for hours! The controls are simple enough that kids can actually play, and it's entertaining for both Star Wars and Lego fans.
Check it out!
Monday, May 01, 2006
Generating PDF bookmarks with DocBook and Arbortext Publishing Engine
I've been creating PDFs via a DocBook customization layer and Arbortext Publishing Engine. For some reason, using this method, I couldn't get bookmarks in the PDF.
I tried various combinations of:
<xsl:param name="arbortext.extensions">1</xsl:param> <xsl:param name="fop1.extensions">1</xsl:param> <xsl:param name="fop.extensions">1</xsl:param>
Thanks to Paul Grosso for giving me the solution: If you are using Arbortext, you should use
<xsl:import href="doctypes/axdocbook/axdocbook-fo.xsl"/>not
<xsl:import href="docbook-xsl-1.69.1/fo/docbook.xsl"/>
I need to take a look in axdocbook-fo.xsl to see what's going on, and figure out how to make the arbortext extension to the DocBook stylesheets generate the bookmarks properly.
I also found some interesting info on linking to PDFs:
If you want to display bookmarks when the PDF opens, create your link like:
<a href="mydoc.pdf#pagemode=bookmarks
Other linking parameters are described at: http://ic.ucsc.edu/docs/tutorials/linkingtopdfs/.