DOCBOOK-APPS: producing high quality output with docbook xsl

[Steffen Petter <spetter at web dot de>]

Hello,

I am a newbie in using docbook and applications therefore. Currently I
am producing a long xml document of doctype book. I use saxon (6.5) for
transformation from docbook (4.1.2) with xslt (1.50.0) to FO and fop
(0.20.3) to PDF with enabled extensions for saxon. I am not glad about
the quality of the output. Of course, there are many xsl:param tags to
customize the (fo) stylesheets but it is not enough or the xslt for fo
must be improved in functionality (or I'm not able to check it out ;-)) 

Firstly, I need a parameter to set first line indents of normal
paragraphs. Nothing could be found to set them. Is this a feature for
future versions?

Secondly, hyphenation is very useful, but not six, seven, eight or more
hyphens underneath each other in one paragraph. Having some experience
in Latex/Tex lets me expect the nice hyphenation control function  also
in transforming by XSLT. 

Thirdly, a title of a chapter or a section and one single line of a
paragraph should not be the last line of a page. Is a control function
for this planned?

I know there are some other methods for transforming . I tried out
OpenJade with DSSSL 1.76 and jadetex to produce tex (dvi) but I don't
understand the customization of dsssl stylesheets yet. The use of
PassiveTex was not satisfying for me. The stylesheet package db2latex
(0.51 and cvs 0.60) was incompatible with xsl 1.50.0. I would prefer to
render high quality outputs with Latex but I am not able to bring
together db2latex and dbxsl 1.50.0. Is there anybody who successfully
tried this? Or is there another method for producing high quality
outputs?

Thanks for your help.

Steffen Petter
 
-- 
Steffen Petter <spetter@web.de>
student of study course of computer applications in civil engineering at
Bauhaus-University Weimar, Germany         --> http://www.uni-weimar.de/
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