Subject: Brochure problems

From: Nick NICHOLAS <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2001 16:08:59 -0700 (PDT)

Hm. The HTML problems Robin is having are strange, but I think I know why
they're there. The Lojban *is* being marked as distinct from the main
text, but it's being marked as TT. The page is in Unicode font, because
unfortunately DSSSL forces it --- the XML has entities for things like
&mdash; , but I haven't worked out how to stop the beastie from converting
the &mdash; into raw Unicode (or at least make a numerical Unicode
entity). And if I don't force display in Unicode, the UTF-8 em
dash comes out as Latin-1 gibberish. Therefore, if you have the same
Unicode font sent for fixed-width and proportional, they'll look the same.
I don't, so they don't.

Furthermore, the CSS stylesheet *is* there; unfortunately, Netscape 4
tends to ignore it, as its CSS support is patchy. Loath as I am to
admit it, Internet Explorer has no problem with the CSS.

Icky all round. The
real solution, I guess, is to force the HTML not to output raw Unicode, or
at least to postprocess the HTML files to convert the Unicode sequences
into entities. But of course, the whole *point* of using something like
DocBook in the first place is to avoid any postprocessing. I'll keep
tinkering with it.

The TeX snafu is a serious problem, and likely to inhere in Jade rather
than the stylesheet. I will switch over to the more recent OpenJade, in
case this is a bug that has been fixed. (Jade hasn't been touched in three
years.) But I cannot tinker with the raw TeX file; and again, the whole
point of the exercise is that I shouldn't need to. When I get hold of
OpenJade, I'll let you know.

The underlying problem in all of this is that the stylesheet technology is
still new and in flux, and not as thoroughly tested as it should be. (I
found a bug in the DocBook stylesheets, even though they've been around
for three years.) So regrettably there will be hiccups along the way.

Meanwhile, lesson 3 has been added.

-- 
Momenton senpretende paseman mi retenis kaj # NICK NICHOLAS.
kultis kvazaux # TLG, UCI, USA.
senhorlogxan elizeon # www.opoudjis.net
(Dume: # [email-masked]
[Victor Sadler, _Memkritiko_ 90] #