[xep-support] Preserving whitespace in programlisting output

[David Cramer (Tech Pubs)]

Kenneth,
This doesn't address the details of your actual question, but my gut tells me that cutting and pasting from pdf to code is not a good idea. Aside from your issue with tabs, what about listings that don't fit well on a page (so you break lines with an arrow indicating that you've done it--the docbook xsls can do this automatically now). One of the reasons we do our docs in DocBook is to provide pdf (for printing) and html formats. We have an eclipse infocenter running standalone to serve up all the docs in a convenient, searchable format to services. From there, they can also get pdfs or chms of individual docs (e.g. to print a portion or send an individual doc to somebody) or the whole infocenter for offline use. Another alternative is having the xsls spit out the programlistings as separate text files in a code samples directory with some naming convention that would make it easy to go from the pdf to the code sample (then even using callouts in the listings would be no problem). But if they're reading online anyway, wouldn't html be a more suitable format? 
 
David 


  _____  

	From: owner-xep-support at renderx.com [mailto:owner-xep-support at renderx.com] On Behalf Of Kenneth Johansson
	Sent: Friday, July 08, 2005 8:31 AM
	To: Xep-Support
	Subject: [xep-support] Preserving whitespace in programlisting output
	
	
	Hi,
	 
	I'm using DocBook <programlisting> a lot for showing chunks of code etc. From what I've deducted from reading on the support mailing list I gather that tabs in <programlisting> are replaced with a single whitespace. 
	 
	I'm using whitespaces in my <programlisting> but when I try to select the result in a PDF I only select the text, not a single whitespace. Is this behavior a Acrobat Reader "feature" or is it a XEP bug, or is it possible to tweak XEP to keep the whitespaces? 
	 
	This is quite a serious problem for us since our service engineers wish to copy the content of these <programlisting>'s and insert it in scripts etc. In some cases the indention is vital, and when pasting 50 rows of code its quite irritating to have to reindent the text.
	 
	Best regards,
	 
	/Kenneth
	 

	--------------------------------------------------------
	Kenneth Johansson       Technical Documentation Manager
	Sectra Imtec AB
	Teknikringen 20         E-mail: ke-joh AT sectra DOT se
	SE-583 30 Linköping     Phone:  +46 13 23 52 00
	SWEDEN                  Web:    http://www.sectra.se <http://www.sectra.se/>  

	 

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