PDF Generation

PDF generation of the KDE docs is something we get asked for every so often, and it turns out to be less easy than you might suppose. There are quite a few tools around that will do the conversion in one way or another, all with their own problems. In the end, we've settled on the db2latex XSL stylesheets to get LaTeX output, and then pdflatex for the PDF. It took some tweaking of the XSL and a Perl script to wrap around it all to fix some of the problems, but we seem to have fairly good-looking output.

And of course, just as I write that, Lauri shows me the output that her version of libxslt produces, which is, erm, less nice: the table of contents has made its way into the title. Great. I guess I'll have to update my libxslt at some point to test.

So, the next step is some more data points, and some testing. To that end, I've put the tools up here. Download it, unpack, and follow the instructions in the README. Hopefully it should work, giving you a nice PDF file of some KDE document. (The Perl code is really not excellent; feel free to send me improvements :-)

In other news, I've joined the legions of text-message obsessed adolescents by (reluctantly) getting myself a mobile phone. So if u c me usng txt slng, KILL ME IMMEDIATELY!