[docbook] Image sizing in HTML output

[Seth Nickell <snickell at stanford dot edu>]

Hi,

I'm an author of a fairly long document (the GNOME Human Interface
Guidelines http://usability.gnome.org/hig) with a lot of images (all
PNG). Because our images generally represent screenshots, we have
written a little tool that regenerates them automatically from an
interface prototyping tool's file format. Thus we have a file per
chapter that contains most of the screenshots as abstract UI mockups and
we can run a little command and it generates the PNGs for us.

The sizes of images change though, and not always in predictable ways
(i.e. when we actually modify a mockup we expect the PNGs size to
change). For example, a minor change in the default "theme" of GNOME
will result in screenshots whose size varies from the previous version
by several pixels in either dimension.

The problem is that we've run into serious issues with our HTML output
if we do not hardcode image sizes in the DocBook source using depth and
width attributes. If we don't hardcode sizes, relative linking functions
terribly in most browsers. The browser jumps to a physical location on
the page, before the images are loaded. Then when the images load, the
page is much longer and the place you wanted to be is well off the
screen. This is a sort of embarassing UI problem for set of interface
guidelines :-)

Does anyone have a trick or technique for addressing this problem (or
suggestions of how they would do it)? Right now I'm either going to grin
and bear it (which means doing a lot of unnecessary work "maintaining"
sync between PNG sizes and docbook attributes) or write some sort of
nasty Perl hack that rewrites the HTML output to add in depth and width
tags.

thanks!

-Seth


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