[drupal-docs] generating Drupal Handbook pdf's manually

[Djun Kim]

Quoting Gabor Hojtsy:

>>
>> This is truly much better then the oo version :) It does not only 
>> keeps the links, which is a must, but also formats the tables and 
>> the like better. But there is still room for improvement. Some 
>> source codes have too much whitespace (eg. page 94), and too big 
>> fonts, some have too small (eg. page 90).

    I believe that the whitespace problems in <code> blocks
can be fixed with a bit of filtering.

    Html2ps does automatic scaling of '<pre>' elements.
There is a bug in its scaling calculation, so the results
are half the size they should be in some circumstances, which
I don't fully understand.

Assuming this bug can be fixed, there is still a bit of a
problem here because of the Drupalesque 'one-line' SQL queries
in various <pre> sections; obviously these will cause the
<pre> elements to be scaled down past the point of legibility.

Quoting Dries:
>
> Agreed. It's much better than the OO-version, and from what I 
> understood, fully-automated.  We'd still need to create an index and 
> be able to use page numbers (rather than just links).  Is that 
> possible?
>

    It is not possible to do this using existing tools and methods.
The generated Postscript is DSC compliant, so in principle, some
kind of automatic indexing could be attempted from the Postscript
file.  However, experience and the wisdom of my elders cautions me
against much faith in automatic indexing.  Careful automatic
indexing of clean source files should be able to generate about 70%
of index entries, in my experience.  The remaining 30% requires
human attention, and of course takes much longer than 30% of
the time required for indexing :)

    When/if Docbook or LaTeX come into the picture, the whole issue
of indexing will have to be revisited.   There's some interesting
problems to be explored.

    Djun

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