Chapter 1. Introduction

Table of Contents

What about DB2LaTeX?
Features
Version
Change History
Publishing Principles
Backend Drivers
XSL Stylesheets
Python Post Processing
LaTeX Style Package

What about DB2LaTeX?

Dblatex started as a DB2LaTeX clone, but since then many things have changed and new features have been added or (hopefully) improved. Now, the portion of shared code is small if any, and the dblatex purpose is different from DB2LaTeX on these points:

  • The project is end-user oriented, that is, it tries to hide as much as possible the latex compiling stuff by providing a single clean script to produce directly DVI, PostScript and PDF output.

  • The actual output rendering is done not only by the XSL stylesheets transformation, but also by a dedicated LaTeX package. The goal is to allow a deep LaTeX customisation without changing the XSL stylesheets.

  • Post-processing is done by Python, to make publication faster, convert the images if needed, and do the whole compilation.