The Mozaic

May 27, 2015

I have finally compiled the anthology of the articles I completely adore and love. In the hope this collection will be useful I have uploaded the resulting PDF into Scribd and into my portfolio.

Book was compiled with AsciiDoc and overall was a great sandbox for learning book authoring using Emacs, AsciiDoc, DocBook and Apache FOP toolchains. I must say it was a total mess which removed 3 working days from my life (forgive me, my company).

I will write in this article all the pitfalls I have encountered and how to avoid them in the quest for ideal PDF layout. HTML output is mostly OK with AsciiDoc.

Fonts

Here is written that ‘#’ symbols are because there is no glyphs in font: http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/faq.html#pdf-characters

Here is the definitive docs about fonts inclusion (also auto-detect): http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/1.1/fonts.html

DejaVu fonts: https://sourceforge.net/projects/dejavu/

PDFTK cat operation here: https://www.pdflabs.com/docs/pdftk-man-page/

General config for FOP here: https://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/1.1/configuration.html

Font selection from DocBook stylesheets: http://www.sagehill.net/docbookxsl/Typography.html This is how specifying fonts in DocBook works.

How to control what to be put into TOC (also list of figures): http://www.sagehill.net/docbookxsl/TOCcontrol.html Also toc.section.depth.

Docbook stylesheets XSL-FO parameter reference here: http://docbook.sourceforge.net/release/xsl/current/doc/fo/