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Getting AsciiDoc -> DocBook XML -> PDF pipeline working on CentOS 5.3

Submitted by Aleksey Tsalolikhin on Fri, 2009-11-27 16:39.Documentation

I'm trying AsciiDoc to obviate the XML "tag soup" I am eating with my DocBook docs.

There were two things I had to tweak to get the asciidoc .TXT -> DocBook XML -> PDF pipeline working on CentOS 5.3:

1. Remove or comment out every mention of the "--nonet" switch in my xmlto (v0.0.23) (xmlto is the wrapper script for the DocBook XML -> PDF process). AsciiDoc generates DocBook XML 4.5, and the CentOS docbook-dtds package only goes up to 4.4, so we need to be able to access the DocBook XML 4.5 DTD over the net.

2. Do NOT put any author info into the AsciiDoc file, as leaving it in would break the LaTeX leg of the process. (DocBook XML -> XHTML would work fine, but DocBook XML -> PDF (or DVI) would break.) Once I took that out, I was able to generate PDF files.

I look forward to getting more experience with AsciiDoc, so far it looks promising.

Yours truly,
Aleksey

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A contrast
Submitted by syscomet on Sat, 2009-11-28 21:07.

You might be interested in reading about Exim's pipeline; Exim did briefly use AsciiDoc as the master format, before abandoning it, but the description of the pipelines and how things work is still informative.

http://vcs.exim.org/viewvc/exim/exim-doc/doc-docbook/HowItWorks.txt?view=markup

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