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Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2016 09:04:15 -0700
From: Robin Lee Powell <rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org>
To: lojban@googlegroups.com
Subject: [lojban] The great irony of the CLL update project.
Message-ID: <20160615160414.GH19771@stodi.digitalkingdom.org>
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So back in the day when deciding what markup to use, I picked
DocBook because it could apparently do everything and was very
clear.  That is, if you see <emphasis>foo!</emphasis>, you know
exactly what that means; clarity for editors.

To get to docbook, I started with a qausi-HTML dump of the original
CLL's .doc

It turns out, however, that there's no good, direct, free path from
DocBook to PDF; you have to go through XSL-FO (what?), LaTeX (badly)
or HTML (via Prince, which is what we're using, or other things;
they all costs money)

The irony is that as of now, *every single output format* goes
through HTML.  In fact, all of them except PDF *are* HTML (ePub is
just the HTML output slightly re-jiggered).

So I could have saved a huge amount of work, if I'd known about how
bad the PDF chain was and if I'd known about Prince, by skipping
DocBook entirely.

(Indeed, one could argue that I should just take the auto-converted
HTML and drop the docbook, but actually it has some advantages; the
HTML is about 2x bigger (i.e. more verbose), which makes
things harder on editors, and we get chunking for free.  But still.)


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