Message-ID: <3DEB7D3F.1050801@fourpalms.org>
Date: Mon, 02 Dec 2002 15:33:19 +0000
From: Thomas Lockhart <lockhart@fourpalms.org>
Organization: Yes
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To: Peter Mount <peter@retep.org.uk>
Cc: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>, Vince Vielhaber <vev@michvhf.com>,
	pgsql-docs@postgresql.org
Subject: Re: PDF docs
References: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0212021459390.1537-100000@heather.retep.org.uk>
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>>>Who generated the PDF docs for 7.2?  Remember how it was done?  Is
>>>there a script somewhere for it?
>>Thomas has always done that in the past.  There is some basic info
>>about it in the docs:
>>http://www.ca.postgresql.org/users-lounge/docs/7.3/postgres/doc-build.html
>>(see B.3.3), but I got the impression that he always did a great deal
>>of manual tweaking in the process.

The amount of tweaking went way down in the last couple of releases 
since I identified the misformed but easily fixed rtf (in the opinion of 
ApplixWare) generated by OpenJade. Look at doc/src/sgml/fixrtf for a 
little utility to do that. OpenOffice seems to be happy with the rtf, 
though I can't remember if I applied "fixrtf" first.

However, I did not generate documents for 7.2. Folks seemed to have 
concluded that it was not a useful feature and were not willing to 
accomodate it in the release process, so I stopped doing that.

Peter E. generated documents automatically for 7.2 (using tex rather 
than rtf->word processor->ps) and it has the deficiencies noted below as 
one would expect since they are well known issues to the OpenJade community.

The "manual tweaking" is a requirement for high-quality docs no matter 
what path you choose; hopefully someone will realize that and decide to 
put in some work.

> IIRC tables didn't format correctly (occasionally split over pages).
> Also (not sure if previous post made it), the docbook->PDF generated badly
> implemented files (~30% bigger than need be) [caused by pdftex].