DocBook Package: Tools are broken and no longer supported

[Jeffrey Walton]

O'Reilly has a sample DocBook at https://prod.oreilly.com/external/tools/docbook/docs/authoring/docbook_source/. After installing Ubuntu's DocBook, `docbook2pdf` was not able to compile O'Reilly's sample book and produce a PDF.

It seems the DocBook package uses a dated version of OpenJade. Not only is it out-dated, it is no longer supported.

To get the tool to work, it was necessary to run `xmllint --xinclude` first. The preprocessing fixed the compile errors, but the resulting PDF does not include images.

Images are included with <mediaobjects> tag. It appears <mediaobjects> was a fix for an earlier <graphic> tag (which lacked an alternate text). OpenJade does not support <mediaobjects>, and there is no fix since its so old and no longer supported.

Perhaps it would be a good idea to update the toolchain with programs that work as expected and are supported.

[Jeffrey Walton (noloader)]

$ uname -a
Linux studio 2.6.32-34-generic #77-Ubuntu SMP Tue Sep 13 19:39:17 UTC 2011 x86_64 GNU/Linux

[Jeffrey Walton (noloader)]

O'Reilly sample book from https://prod.oreilly.com/external/tools/docbook/docs/authoring/docbook_source/

[Jeffrey Walton (noloader)]

OpenJade does not produce an image for the following. PNG, JPG, GIF, etc make no difference.

<mediaobject>
  <imageobject>
    <imagedata fileref="my_image.png" format="PNG"/>
  </imageobject>
<mediaobject>

http://www.docbook.org/tdg/en/html/imageobject.html
http://www.docbook.org/tdg/en/html/imagedata.html

[Daniel Leidert (dleidert-deactivatedaccount)]

Your report contains several problems and it is not clear to me, what you are requesting nor what you are exactly complaining about (except that docbook-utils is not a recent toolchain). Therefor I'm setting it to "Invalid". Please reassign and formulate your request. There are the issues with your report:

docbook2pdf belongs to docbook-utils not docbook.
openjade also does not belong to docbook.
docbook contains the *SGML* document type definitions, but you are referring to an XML file.
docbook-utils is not a recent toolchain and usually not adequate for DocBook XML. To process the XML sources you should use docbook-xsl (with e.g. xsltproc or xslto) or docbook2x or xmlroff. I would recommend the one mentioned first. You might also get docbook-xsl2 from the upstream website and use it with an XSLT2 processor like saxon9.

[Jeffrey Walton (noloader)]

> Your report contains several problems and it is not clear to
> me, what you are requesting nor what you are exactly
> complaining about (except that docbook-utils is not a recent toolchain).
No problem. It does not change the fact it does not work. Try it your self.

Jeff