Replacing Docbook

[Geert Janssens]

On Friday 28 August 2015 15:48:53 Mike Evans wrote:
> On Fri, 28 Aug 2015 15:15:58 +0100
> > I just tried docbook2odf with the guide and it does a reasonably
> > good job.  Some imgaes need resizing and there's a "Generated by
> > docbooktoodf" side bar on every page.  A little editing though and
> > it should look OK.
> > 
> > Using GIT with LibreOffice works quite well after installing some
> > python utils.
> > 
> > Mike E
> 
> Oh, dear.  More scrolling revealed loads of missing images.
> 
> Mike E

I did the same exercise just now. Note that I used the latest svn revision of docbook2odf (r253) 
which is slightly more recent than the ones found on the download page.

The screenshots are all there on my system, although many of them are improperly sized. 
That's probably because we have been sloppy at that in our docbook version as well and just 
relied on the images being viewed at 100% size. That's probably not ok in odt which is geared 
towards printing.

During the conversion there was an error for 4 pnm image files not being found. I suspect 
these are the images used to highlight warnings and tips and such. I didn't see those in the odt 
file.

The image we had in multiple resolutions (the accounting equation) is added 3 times, probably 
because we had specified it 3 times in our source.

The table of contents is missing as is the list of figures and tables.

It's getting worse: all cross-references are gone.

And worse: I did one single edit - remove the vertical docbook2odf banner. I did so by removing 
the page header in the page settings.
This resulted in a git diff of a whopping +1351/-1368 line changes. Most of the changes are 
arbitrary like styles changing names, changing regional settings, adding soft-page-breaks,...

Of course this can all be easily committed into git. However it will be rather difficult to follow 
changes made if the patches are so full of gratuitous changes.

If we can't get libreoffice to make less noisy diffs, it's very unlikely it will be in improvement 
over the current situation.

Regards,

Geert