"http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.4/docbookx.dtd">

<chapter>

<title>Introduction</title>

<section>

<title>What about DB2LaTeX?</title>

<para><command>Dblatex</command> started as a 

url="http://db2latex.sourceforge.net">DB2LaTeX</ulink> clone, but since then

many things have changed and new features have been added or (hopefully)

improved. Now, the portion of shared code is small if any, and the dblatex

purpose is different from DB2LaTeX on these points:</para>

<itemizedlist>

<listitem>

<para>The project is end-user oriented, that is, it tries to hide as much as

possible the latex compiling stuff by providing a single clean script to

produce directly DVI, PostScript and PDF output.</para>

</listitem>

<listitem>

<para>The actual output rendering is done not only by the XSL stylesheets

transformation, but also by a dedicated LaTeX package. The goal is to allow a

deep LaTeX customisation without changing the XSL stylesheets.</para>

</listitem>

<listitem>

<para>Post-processing is done by Python, to make publication faster, convert

the images if needed, and do the whole compilation.</para>

</listitem>

</itemizedlist>

</section>

<section>

<title>Features</title>

<para>With <command>dblatex</command> you can:</para>

<itemizedlist>

<listitem>

<para>transform a DocBook XML/SGML book or article to pure LaTeX,</para>

</listitem>

<listitem>

<para>compile the temporary LaTeX file with <command>latex</command>,

<command>pdflatex</command>, or <command>xelatex</command> to produce DVI,

PostScript and PDF files,</para>

</listitem>

<listitem>

<para>publish a set of books,</para>

</listitem>

<listitem>

<para>convert on the fly the figures included in the document,</para>

</listitem>

<listitem>

<para>have cross references with hot links,</para>

</listitem>

<listitem>

<para>olink to other documents built with <command>dblatex</command>,</para>

</listitem>

<listitem>

<para>write complex tables,</para>

</listitem>

<listitem>

<para>write several bibliographies,</para>

</listitem>

<listitem>

<para>reuse BibTeX bibliographies,</para>

</listitem>

<listitem>

<para>use callouts on program listings or on images,</para>

</listitem>

<listitem>

<para>create an index with <command>makeindex</command> or <command>xindy</command>,</para>

</listitem>

<listitem>

<para>write mathematical equations in LaTeX,</para>

</listitem>

<listitem>

<para>write mathematical equations in MathML,</para>

</listitem>

<listitem>

<para>have revision bars,</para>

</listitem>

<listitem>

<para>customise the output rendering with an XSL configuration file,</para>

</listitem>

<listitem>

<para>use your own LaTeX style package.</para>

</listitem>

</itemizedlist>

</section>

<section>

<title>Version</title>

<para>This manual is for dblatex version 

xmlns:xi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude"/>.</para>

</section>

<section id="sec-changelog">

<title>Change History</title>

<para>See the 

targetptr="intro">Release Notes</olink>

url="../release-notes/index.html">Release Notes</ulink> to have the dblatex

change history.</para>

</section>

<section>

<title>Publishing Principles</title>

<para>Dblatex transforms a DocBook XML/SGML document to LaTeX. Once

transformed into LaTeX, standard LaTeX tools are used to produce DVI,

Postcript or PDF files.</para>

<para><xref linkend="fig-processus" /> explains the process applied. It shows

the tools used and the steps. The emphasized tools are provided by the

package.</para>

<figure float="0" id="fig-processus">

<title>Transforming Process</title>

<mediaobject>

<imageobject>

<imagedata align="center" fileref="processus" width="60%" />

</imageobject>

</mediaobject>

</figure>

<section id="sec-process">

<title>Backend Drivers</title>

<para>The main script supports the following LaTeX backend drivers:</para>

<variablelist>

<varlistentry>

<term>dvips</term>

<listitem>

<para>The driver calls <command>latex</command>, and produces DVI, Postscript

and at the end PDF files. Latex natively accepts only EPS graphics. The

drawback is that converting to PDF can take a while.</para>

</listitem>

</varlistentry>

<varlistentry>

<term>pdftex</term>

<listitem>

<para>The driver calls <command>pdflatex</command>, to directly produce PDF

files. The conversion is fast, the file size is smaller. Pdflatex natively

accepts PDF, PNG, JPEG, and TIFF graphics.</para>

</listitem>

</varlistentry>

<varlistentry>

<term>xetex</term>

<listitem>

<para>The driver calls <command>xelatex</command>, to directly produce PDF

files through the <ulink url="http://scripts.sil.org/xetex">XeTeX</ulink>

engine. This engine natively supports UTF-8 which improves multilingual

support.</para>

</listitem>

</varlistentry>

</variablelist>

</section>

<section id="sec-stylesheets">

<title>XSL Stylesheets</title>

<para>The XSL stylesheets located under <filename>xsl/</filename> are used to

transform from XML to “raw” LaTeX. The main file is

<filename>latex_book_fast.xsl</filename>, that includes the other stylesheets

of the directory.</para>

</section>

<section id="sec-perl-process">

<title>Python Post Processing</title>

<para>Actually the XSL stylesheets does not produce valid LaTeX. The reason is

that some DocBook processing is too complex or too time-consuming for XSL

transforming. Besides, some extra actions need sometimes to be done such like

figure conversion. Here are the main actions done by Python Post

processing:</para>

<itemizedlist>

<listitem>

<para>Transform the entities to valid LaTeX characters (e.g. &nbsp; is

transformed to '~'). Python is suited and performant for this task.</para>

</listitem>

<listitem>

<para>Convert the figures to be compatible with the backend driver. See 

linkend="sec-figinclude" /> for more detail.</para>

</listitem>

<listitem>

<para>Force some hyphenation in tables or for typed words.</para>

</listitem>

<listitem>

<para>Do the whole LaTeX compilation sequence thanks to the 

url="http://www.pps.jussieu.fr/~beffara/soft/rubber">rubber</ulink>

compilation engine.</para>

</listitem>

</itemizedlist>

</section>

<section>

<title>LaTeX Style Package</title>

<para>Once valid LaTeX is available, the LaTeX style package (docbook.sty)

under <filename>latex/style/</filename> is used to customize the output

rendering. It includes the other files of the directory. You can also provide

your own LaTeX style (cf. <xref linkend="sec-custom" />).</para>

</section>

</section>

</chapter>