Tag search
A YuiCompressorFilter for Phing
by Sander MarechalI have been playing with Phing quite a lot lately. Phing is a build system that looks and acts a lot like Apache Ant, except that it is written in PHP. That's a great thing for PHP developers like me, because it makes it much easier to extend the system with custom extensions.
I am going to write several useful extensions, the first of which is a YuiCompressorFilter. Phing already has support for a JavaScrip minifier in the form of the JsMinTask, but the yui-compressor is more useful. Not only does it usually compress better than JsMin, it can also compress CSS files. Also, because my YuiCompressor extension is implemented as a filter instead of a task you can do fancy things like minifying and concatenating files in a single step.
DocBook XML to PDF on Debian Lenny
by Sander MarechalI have recently been writing some documentation in DocBook XML format that I wanted to convert to PDF. Debian has a really useful package called xmlto that you can use for this, but it did not work for me. The xmlto tool converts DocBook to PDF through LaTeX and I was getting all kinds of errors. Instead I opted to use the DocBook-XSL stylesheets to convert DocBook to fo and use Apache fop to convert it to PDF.
DocBook-XSL and Apache fop work wonderfully well but there were a couple of bumps that I had to sort out before everything worked as it should, especially regarding the Java setup and getting images to work correctly. Here is how I set up my DocBook toolchain on Debian Lenny.
