John, On 12/06/2014 03:12 PM, John Maddock wrote:
I've noticed that Boost.Build documentation, created with BoostBook, explicitly sets a small, and IMO unreadable, font, so I went to fix that, and some other things, as shown at:
The font and size is set with our stylesheets, nothing to do with Boostbook/docbook.
Right, and I had no problem changing that - and it's live at, for example: if anybody wants to comment on the style itself.
However, after a few easy tweaks, I'm stuck at the fact that BoostBook/DocBook produces fairly old-fashioned HTML. For example, the Boost logo at top is actually a table,
We're responsible for that too - it's part of our customisation layer - if it's old fashioned, it's because it was written a long time ago and no one has touched it since!
Are you sure? It appears to be admon.xsl:graphical.admonition template in base Docbook XSLT layer, with BoostBook doing minor tweaks only. Anyway, I could switch to non-graphical admonitions to get HTML structure I could style, also live at above URL.
and the "tip" block is also a table, which makes tweaking the layout with CSS quite a bit more complex. Also, some of the conceptually trivial things, like putting some front matter in index.html, appear to require XSLT customization.
I think that's this XSL param: http://docbook.sourceforge.net/release/xsl/current/doc/html/chunk.first.sect...
When "false" the first section ends up in the index page (right after the index), or maybe you meant something else?
Thanks, I did not know about this option, and it's an improvement from my point of view, and I've enabled it for Boost.Build. The original question was about adding some front-matter that would not be present in TOC, and I've ended up abusing the 'dedication' element for it.
As heretic as it sounds, do we get any benefits from BoostBook? It's a complex vocabulary, with complex toolchain, and while PDF generation sounded nice 10 years ago, printing HTML into PDF is a viable option these days - and nobody would want to print entire Boost documentation anyway?
Personally I like the PDF's *of individual libraries* not the whole thing - they're easier to search and often to navigate than the HTML. BTW printing HTML looses a lot of the structural information that docbook contains, for example you don't get the document outline in the left pane.
Fair enough. On the other hand, HTML produced by BoostBook/DocBook is not quite perfect either and aging, and nobody's working on improving it. -- Vladimir Prus CodeSourcery / Mentor Embedded http://vladimirprus.com