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Date: Sat, 28 Dec 2013 00:06:56 -0800
From: Robin Lee Powell <rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org>
To: lojban@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: The CLL project, technical directions
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On Fri, Dec 27, 2013 at 10:58:55AM -0800, Judson wrote:
> My experience with dag/cll is limited to building it a couple of
> times to strip it for references for an Anki deck. That said I
> think I can contribute at least one insight:
> 
> It's really obnoxiously difficult to set up the CLL build
> environment.

OMG it really really is.

Given the extremely limited subset of docbook we use, one option is
to just roll our own conversion to LaTeX and HTML from scratch; that
would at least make that part easier.

> I wound up having to update my X11 server to make it work, which
> is one of those red flags for me normally. It also struck me as
> kind of ridiculous as a requirement.

That should only be required for Calibre's ebook-convert, which you
only need for MOBI and EPUB.  They are based on the HTML version and
arne't normally needed; they can be ignored for this purpose.

> BUT, I have very little experience with document processing, and
> especially with docbook. (I have been involved with a project to
> write a LaTeX parser in Ruby, which is about as fun as you
> imagine.) Maybe there aren't better tools to complete the docbook
> to PDF pipeline?

I've not found anything; you're welcome to investigate.  To see what
Nick did with L4B back in the day, see
http://www.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/lojbanbrochure/README.html ; it
doesn't look much better to me.

> All that said, addressing your specific questions:
> 
> 1) I currently am experiencing the initial disbelief one has in 
> encountering a new project. "Surely it doesn't *need* to be this 
> complicated."

*I KNOW, RIGHT?!?*

It's freaking ridiculous.

> Of course, that's the viewpoint that led Knuth to start TeX as a
> weekend project in the 70s... Every document processing project
> I've encountered as requirements that led them to their current
> workflow, and I don't have the expertise to address them, so... My
> only cogent thought is: given that LaTeX is a necessary evil,
> maybe it'd be a better source language? At least things like
> \selmaho could be written directly?

It's actually trying to do exactly that that led to this current
discussion.  It turns out that trying to go from LaTeX to HTML is
just as horrendous as trying to go from docbook to PDF.  Unless you
know something there I don't?

Given that converting to LaTeX still leaves us with a horrible
two-fork mess, I don't see the advantage.

> 2) This may already be available, but in general the most useful
> tool for debugging text transformations I've found are source
> maps. Failing that, the poor-man's version are source comments
> (e.g. <!-- chapter2/section3.docbook:33-58 -->)

That last is a good idea, thanks.

> 3) On the one hand, I'm personally more comfortable in Ruby, but on the 
> other: is re-writing that conversion process the best approach? What's it 
> written in now?

XSLT, which everyone who has even considered helping me has
absolutely refused to touch, which was why I was asking most of
these questions in the first place.  See
https://github.com/dag/cll/blob/docbook/xml/docbook2html_preprocess.xsl
for an example.

-Robin

-- 
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