Proposal to use meinproc for Kubuntu

[Jonathan Jesse]

I would prefer not to settle with what is the easiest to do but what is the
best and most professional thing to do.

I don't know enough about DocBook iself to start arguing about the different
tools we can use but shouldn't we do what is closest to what happens
upstream so any docs we create at this level could be pushed upstream if
they apply there.  (For example the Adept Guide)

-----Original Message-----
From: ubuntu-doc-bounces at lists.ubuntu.com
[mailto:ubuntu-doc-bounces at lists.ubuntu.com]On Behalf Of Matthew East
Sent: Wednesday, November 23, 2005 1:00 PM
To: ubuntu-doc at lists.ubuntu.com
Subject: Re: Proposal to use meinproc for Kubuntu


On Wed, 2005-11-23 at 11:52 +0000, Matthew East wrote:

> We were already using the built-in KDE stylesheets from kdelibs-data (I
> copied them into our tree to avoid the necessity for users to install
> that package).

I should start by saying I'm no expert on this stuff, however I am
currently of the idea that we can think about using xsltproc for all
Kubuntu docs, even the offline ones, by supplying the kde-default.css
with the package and unifying the stylesheets we use. I don't think
Riddell agrees with me on this, but it is something that we can discuss
gradually. I certainly thing that it has these advantages:

* no separate build system for online/offline documents in Kubuntu
* support for xinclude (which in turn has advantages of being able to
pick and choose which files to translate and which do not need
translating, and that we can include the licences easily)
* same build system for Ubuntu and Kubuntu docs, same xsl stylesheets,
different css.
* no kde-specific libraries required to build the documents, only
docbook-xsl.

The disadvantages, AFAICS, would be:

* Meinproc makes compressed copies of the html documents, which thus
save space in packaging (query whether xsltproc can do this?)
* Riddell mentioned that there was an aesthetic problem with the html
documents we shipped in Breezy created with xsltproc, I'll install
Kubuntu and take a look at this hopefully this weekend.

We can talk about this, do some reading, and see if we can iron out what
is the best way. Obviously, we need to focus on actually getting the
docs written, and we have enough time to sort this build business out.

Matt
--
mdke at ubuntu.com
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