Am 24.11.2005 um 05:07 schrieb Keith Hanlan:

...
me to the computer. This begs the question: why not just supply the PDF on the website? This is *way* too much work for a manual.

Good idea, we should have had that by our own. Guess what - we did: http://docs.gimp.org/en.pdf

But be warned, IIRC these files are not printable very well.

lexA

Thanks,
Keith Hanlan
Ottawa, Canada

On Wed, Nov 23, 2005 at 11:07:30PM -0500, Keith Hanlan wrote:

I am trying to build the PDF version of the Gimp manual and am running into problems. I have an up-to-date FC4 installation and I am hoping someone can point me to a simple mistake that I can rectify.

Just on start in short: Creating PDF's doesn't work currently. The LaTeX interpreter stops with an error. It seems that it can't place all the figures correctly and I haven't figured a workaround out for this yet.

A fix will be very, very welcome.

I'm trying to keep it simple by doing the following: # ALL_LINGUAS=en ./configure --without-gimp --disable-network # make
# make pdf

Looks good so fahr ...

But I get the following mess:
|keithh@kph [219]* make pdf
|mkdir -p -- xml
|-- Profiling XML for en
|*** Profiling XML files ***
|*** Building LaTeX files ***
|-- Building LaTeX for en
|I/O error : Attempt to load network entity http://db2latex.sourceforge.net/xsl/docbook.xsl |warning: failed to load external entity "http://db2latex.sourceforge.net/xsl/docbook.xsl" |compilation error: file ../../stylesheets/plainprint.xsl line 6 element import |xsl:import : unable to load http://db2latex.sourceforge.net/xsl/docbook.xsl |make: *** [stamps/latex.stamp] Error 5

It seems, that you either haven't installed the 'db2latex' XSL stylesheets[1] or you have a broken XML catalog (probably mostly located at /etc/xml/catalog). This catalog helps to find the stylesheets on your harddisk.

The configure command produced the following:

Looks good as well ...

On a related topic: the reason that I'm trying to build the PDF file is that I want to print a hard-copy. If I'm going to invest a lot of time learning a new tool, I want a manual that doesn't tie me to the computer. This begs the question: why not just supply the PDF on the website? This is *way* too much work for a manual.

As Axel already mentioned. We did put PDF versions on our project page (http://docs.gimp.org). Unfortunately, they're not very up-to-date because of the recent errors I'm running into ... Additionally, some of the figures in the manual are not placed correctly on a page. Well, having said, it's far from usable.

[1] - http://db2latex.sf.net

Greetings,

On 11/24/05, Roman Joost wrote:

On Wed, Nov 23, 2005 at 11:07:30PM -0500, Keith Hanlan wrote:

I am trying to build the PDF version of the Gimp manual and am running into problems. I have an up-to-date FC4 installation and I am hoping someone can point me to a simple mistake that I can rectify.

Just on start in short: Creating PDF's doesn't work currently. The LaTeX interpreter stops with an error. It seems that it can't place all the figures correctly and I haven't figured a workaround out for this yet.

A fix will be very, very welcome.

I replaced the justification manually from: /begin{figure}[htb]
into
/begin{figure}[H]
and now it crashes somewhere else on a non-figure spot:

ages/using/nl/toolbox-description.png>]

! Argument of \user@active@arg" has an extra }.

\par l.1239 ...tinstellingen opslaan bij verlaten ..."} in het {\sffamily \bfseri...

I hope this helps a little bit? --
Hans de Jonge
+31 (0)24 844 96 85
+31 (0)62 20 57 101

Am 24.11.2005 um 23:04 schrieb Keith Hanlan:

hmm, it should be 2.0.9 too! Pretty sure it is!

No, it doesn't look like the HTML version. The date is 2004 and there is only a "What?s New in The Gimp 2.0?" section. There is no "What?s New in The Gimp 2.2?" section.

Hmm, Roman - we need to do something about this - should I start trying to get that cow flying?

But be warned, IIRC these files are not printable very well.

bummer. And there don't seem to be any up-to-date commericial books either.

Perhaps I should be also be asking if the docbook framework has a serious usability issue if it cannot produce printable documents. Is this a problem that is being addressed?

Well, a difficult issue. DocBook itself is xml. Publishing has not much to do with docbook itself, its more about xml stylesheets and translations. PDF transformations are mostly done via so called FOPs but this seems to be a standard the is mostly instable or incomplete implemented. Another way - the way the GIMP docs project is going - is to transform the xml into latex and generating pdf from latex. Unfortunately the docbook xml - latex transformation is an very complex issue that involves lots of "magic".

Good lord - how complicated. I think I'm going to miss troff!

As an outside observer, I'm curious as to why you couldn't use OpenOffice? Is it simply not up to the task of a 500 page book?

I know from my own experience that it's still a little rough around the edges but it is quite usable for moderately large documents. It can also produce HTML, DocBook, XHTML, and MSOffice XML. Don't get me wrong: I'm sure that there were good reasons. But from the outside, it looks like somebody has architected a monster.

Well it's not that bad - creating the html version is pretty straight forward. May be we should consider building a one file html as long as the pdf is out of order ...
... um, the gimp manual is up to 450 pages in around 7 (en;de;cs;nl;fr;sv;zh_CN) languages. A team of around a dozen people is working on it - thats nothing you want to do in OO !

But we could need some help with it everytime - so if you have questions or annotations to the manual - please ask and state them !

sincerely, lexA

Thanks,
Keith Hanlan
Ottawa, Canada

---
Live is like a chocolate box, you never know what you wanna get... GPG Signatur auf http://wernicke-online.net/Impressum/ pr?fen

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Hi Keith,

On Thu, Nov 24, 2005 at 05:28:25PM -0500, Keith Hanlan wrote:

On Thu, 24 Nov 2005, Axel Wernicke wrote:

Well it's not that bad - creating the html version is pretty straight forward. May be we should consider building a one file html as long as the pdf is out of order ... ... um, the gimp manual is up to 450 pages in around 7 (en;de;cs;nl;fr;sv;zh_CN) languages. A team of around a dozen people is working on it - thats nothing you want to do in OO !

I figured as much. Is it possible to produce a single DocBook file? And can that file be loaded by OpenOffice long enough to do the transform? Perhaps I can just do an end-run around the problem.

You need XSL stylesheets which transform DocBook/XML to OpenOffice Open Document Format (hope I got it right). If there are any, we can produce OpenOffice documents.

The point is, LaTeX is currently the best system which can deal with this amount of text very well. Unfortunately, most of the grafics we use are converted to inlinegraphic elements in LaTeX. Those graphic elements are problematic to align correctly over a few pages and leads in to errors. I'm sure it's a mostly a fact of changing from the most mediaobjects to figure elements in DocBook.

But we could need some help with it everytime - so if you have questions or annotations to the manual - please ask and state them !

Thanks very much for your help gentlemen. I'm looking forward to curling up with a nice fat book over the holidays.

Heh :)

Greetings,

On Thu, Nov 24, 2005 at 11:08:09PM +0100, Hans De Jonge wrote:

On 11/24/05, Roman Joost wrote:

On Wed, Nov 23, 2005 at 11:07:30PM -0500, Keith Hanlan wrote:

I am trying to build the PDF version of the Gimp manual and am running into problems. I have an up-to-date FC4 installation and I am hoping someone can point me to a simple mistake that I can rectify.

Just on start in short: Creating PDF's doesn't work currently. The LaTeX interpreter stops with an error. It seems that it can't place all the figures correctly and I haven't figured a workaround out for this yet.

A fix will be very, very welcome.

I replaced the justification manually from: /begin{figure}[htb]
into
/begin{figure}[H]
and now it crashes somewhere else on a non-figure spot:

I tried to change the alignment rules, but doesn't solve the problem unfortunately. Well, maybe I missed something, but it didn't work for me.

Thanks for your hint :)

Greetings,

On Thu, Nov 24, 2005 at 11:23:11PM +0100, Axel Wernicke wrote:

Am 24.11.2005 um 23:04 schrieb Keith Hanlan:

hmm, it should be 2.0.9 too! Pretty sure it is!

No, it doesn't look like the HTML version. The date is 2004 and there is only a "What?s New in The Gimp 2.0?" section. There is no "What?s New in The Gimp 2.2?" section.

Hmm, Roman - we need to do something about this - should I start trying to get that cow flying?

Hm, actually ... I'm missing the other Mail you're refering to and I don't understand what it is about ...

Greetings,