Firstly, sorry for the amount of questions I've been asking recently, I don't
mean to dominate the mailing list. I have been working on a book for O'Reilly
Media on Apache CouchDB. The book uses AsciiDoc for its source files and we
transform into HTML for the Web and DocBook for O'Reilly.
http://books.couchdb.org/relax/
The book and our build system are still under heavy development (so expect more
questions, heh) but we will release our code when the book gets published.
Many thanks to Stuart for his continued help and patience.
--
Noah Slater, http://tumbolia.org/nslater
It would be interesting what software will you use for the figures.
One of my favorites in asciidoc's features is that i can produce both
nice html and pdf output from the same source (recently even for math
formulas in most cases).
http://udrepper.livejournal.com/19751.html <- I read here about
MetaPost, the small pdf size sounds promising, though I have no idea if
it's possible to somehow get it to produce some picture output as well
for html.
So, how do the others draw figures in asciidoc? (Let's exclude asciiart
and/or hand-drawn graphics, I'm far better in programming than in
drawing. :) )
Well, as you can see, at the moment we are using hand drawings and scanning them
in. Our O'Reilly designers will be taking care of converting these into
professional illustrations.
> One of my favorites in asciidoc's features is that i can produce both nice
> html and pdf output from the same source (recently even for math formulas in
> most cases).
Yes, for us - we have a special O'Reilly repository that we can check our
DocBook into and it will spit out nicely formatted PDFs. If I could convince
them to make this hidden tool-chain free software, that would be so amazing. Not
going to happen though. Heh.
> http://udrepper.livejournal.com/19751.html <- I read here about MetaPost, the
> small pdf size sounds promising, though I have no idea if it's possible to
> somehow get it to produce some picture output as well for html.
Have you since PrinceXML?
Unfortunately non-free software. I have had an interesting, and very reasonable,
discussion with them about making this free software. The summary was that they
could not viably afford to right now, but if this became a financial possibility
it would be an option they would strongly consider.
> So, how do the others draw figures in asciidoc? (Let's exclude asciiart and/or
> hand-drawn graphics, I'm far better in programming than in drawing. :) )
Have you seen this:
http://www.websequencediagrams.com/
Unfortunately, this is a hosted service with no source code.
An example can be seen here:
http://tomayko.com/writings/things-caches-do
A good, and very popular, free software alternative is GraphViz.
Thanks,
Noah Slater <nsl...@tumbolia.org> writes:
> Firstly, sorry for the amount of questions I've been asking recently, I don't
> mean to dominate the mailing list. I have been working on a book for O'Reilly
> Media on Apache CouchDB. The book uses AsciiDoc for its source files and we
> transform into HTML for the Web and DocBook for O'Reilly.
I'll admit that I was a bit curious about the detailed level of your
questions, for I've viewed asciidoc as a nifty way to generate nicely
formatted, lightweight text (I use it regularly for a set of client
reports, for example). I have used DocBook for producing heavier-weight
text in the past (for example, documentation for another client
project), and I had considered the two separately and viewed asciidoc's
DocBook output as a convenient step in the process of generating PDF.
Thanks to your comments, I now see that line is rather blurry. I'm
impressed that you can generate what you need for a book with asciidoc
markup, and I'll think more seriously about this use in the future.
Just curious: is your permanent source the asciidoc source, or are you
using it in a first-pass creation mode and then following up by editing
the xml? And is there an equivalent to xincludes in asciidoc?
Bill
- --
Bill Harris http://facilitatedsystems.com/weblog/
Facilitated Systems Everett, WA 98208 USA
http://facilitatedsystems.com/ phone: +1 425 337-5541
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux)
iEYEARECAAYFAkk+kc8ACgkQ3J3HaQTDvd/aeQCbBMChHkAoPlrZm9F4+0SMczKp
ZeYAniRKmn0c1GWOVXnExzjHLQwufY6Q
=o6zX
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
Ah, yes. I'm also trying to make a general purpose AsciiDoc build system along
with the book and release this as free software when we're done. Problems that I
might have been able to bodge around with a configuration hack are much more
tempting for me to "get right" by bugging Stuart on the mailing list. Heh.
> Thanks to your comments, I now see that line is rather blurry. I'm impressed
> that you can generate what you need for a book with asciidoc markup, and I'll
> think more seriously about this use in the future.
Great, I would consider that a great result. Once we're closer to releasing the
book I will add a colophon or similar so that people can point at it and
recommend AsciiDoc for larger projects too. I was chatting with the guys doing
the Scala book for O'Reilly, and they loved it, so I would be surprised if we
were the last folks to use AsciiDoc for this.
> Just curious: is your permanent source the asciidoc source, or are you using
> it in a first-pass creation mode and then following up by editing the xml?
Aside from a quick once over with xmllint to check against the O'Reilly
recommended DocBook DTD we don't do any post-processing on the DocBook or
HTML. My build system will do post-processing, but only to add metadata. The
AsciiDoc core is more than sufficient for generating correct content markup.
> And is there an equivalent to xincludes in asciidoc?
Yes, see § 17.3.1. Include Macros:
http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/userguide.html#X63
Best,
Noah Slater <nsl...@tumbolia.org> writes:
> Great, I would consider that a great result. Once we're closer to
> releasing the book I will add a colophon or similar so that people can
> point at it and recommend AsciiDoc for larger projects too.
Thanks; that would be great.
>> And is there an equivalent to xincludes in asciidoc?
>
> Yes, see § 17.3.1. Include Macros:
>
> http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/userguide.html#X63
Great; thanks.
Bill
- --
Bill Harris http://facilitatedsystems.com/weblog/
Facilitated Systems Everett, WA 98208 USA
http://facilitatedsystems.com/ phone: +1 425 337-5541
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux)
iEYEARECAAYFAkk+oNoACgkQ3J3HaQTDvd9f1QCfQEKYugKJYbRANuS1FY38RtOy
KsQAmwdOPIaW2OgMWR3zZ6rmbva/gDls
=J8ob
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
OK, I played with it a bit, and it looks very impressive.
There are many tutorials here:
http://www.tug.org/metapost.html
I just picked one (http://www.ursoswald.ch/metapost/tutorial.html) and
based on that I tried to see how hard is to create something like
http://frugalware.org/images/logo-new.png
I put out the .mp file, the Makefile and the result to:
http://git.frugalware.org/repos/vmexam/metapost/
Sort of ugly, but that's already far better than doing it with gimp or
other such tool which requires manual skill. ;-)
Looks interesting.
> About HTML, I believe ghostscript + imagemagick (convert -resize
> <new_size> foo.eps foo.png) does a good job to produce web-oriented
> picture format. I don't know how this could be integrated in Asciidoc
> though.... Is the a way to filter some input formats so that you use
> EPS for Docbook generation and automatically generated PNG for html?
You can write a Makefile to do this for you, then define a
backend-dependent 'picture' (or similar) macro which includes the
postscript for dblatex and the png for html.
BTW, did you manage to include postscript in a pdf using
asciidoc/dblatex?
asciidoc's pass macro lets you put anything to the docbook xml, but I
have no idea how to put the '\includegraphics{test.ps}' (where file.ps
is a postscript output) to the docbook xml.
Thanks.
Yes, you are right.
Thank you for the tutorial. :-)
(At the moment it's not that interesting for me, but I'm sure it's
useful for other FOP users and maybe one day I'll need it.)