[xep-support] Rendering DocBook sets as multiple documents

[G. Ken Holman]

At 2003-09-08 10:07 +1000, Kevin Yank wrote:
>I am starting work on a DocBook XML project that will be published as a two
>volume set of books. Each of these books must contain an index to both
>books, with page number citations of the form "I-123" for page 123 of volume
>I.
>
>DocBook XML appears to have all the tools to model this. I can enclose the
>two <book>s in a <set> and end both <book>s with a <setindex>.
>
>Things are less straightforward when it comes to the rendering process,
>though. As far as I can tell, XSL-FO in general and XEP in particular don't
>let you produce two output documents from a single source document in one
>process, do they?

True, XSL-FO is defined for only one process.  Cross references used for 
page number citations are to locations inside of the area tree, and there 
is only one area tree in a process.

>I would appreciate any suggestions on how to go about producing two
>PostScript output files which share page number citations as described
>above.

Would you accept a single PostScript file with both volumes, the second one 
starting at page 1, and splitting the resulting file in two?  Or creating a 
PDF from the PDF and then splitting the PDF into two using a publicly 
available PDF library like iText?

Because the process works over only a single FO file you will get your 
"cross-volume" references resolved correctly.

My approach would be three sets of pages in one output FO file: volume 1, a 
magic one-page signal file, then volume 2.  I would then produce the PDF 
from the PostScript and write a Python program accessing the iText library 
in Java through Jython, streaming the pages of the PDF to a volume 1 output 
file, tripping over the magic page as a signal to start volume 2, then 
putting the rest of the pages of the PDF file out to a volume 2 output 
file.  I suppose if I really needed PostScript results I could probably go 
from the PDF to PostScript, but I've never researched how that might be ... 
of course if there were a library that split PostScript files then I would 
just split the result and not bother with the PDF.

It would be totally automated and unattended and result in two distinct files.

I hope this helps!

................... Ken

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G. Ken Holman                 mailto:gkholman at CraneSoftwrights.com
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