Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 56011
docbook2rtf produces bad rtf
Last modified: 2008-05-01 11:38:01 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.1b1; Mac_PowerPC) Description of problem: when converting docbook to pdf, ps, rtf, the export to rtf always produces a mangled rtf file. Abiword fails to load it, and MS Word2000 opens it, but with one line per page. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. create docbook file 2. run "docbook2rtf [file]" 3. open file in favorite word processor Actual Results: Abiword says it is an invalid file Expected Results: I should have seen output similar to my postscript and pdf Additional info: I noticed this in RedHat Linux 7.1. Hoped 7.2 would fix it. Nope. This is important to me, as I am trying to move our comapny away from Word doc format. My docbooks need to be exportable to a form that the "suits" can open in Word and modify.
Which stylesheet are you using? I thought this was fixed already when bug #49677 got closed.
Can you give me an example document that renders badly for you? By the way, I don't think AbiWord's RTF filter is very resilient..
Created attachment 37265 [details] sample docbook that fails to create rtf
I don't know what stytle sheet I am usung. I just create the docbook file and then run the "stadard" tool, docbook2rtf. I guess I am getting the defaults.
Okay, here's what I see when I view the RTF in Ted (a GPL RTF editor): Page i, book title, "IS Operations Manual". Page ii blank except for header. Page iii, table of contents showing the chapter and its two sections. Page 1 then looks like this: Chapter 1. Guiding Principals Organizational Goals This is a test paragraph under this section of this chapter. [etc] Departmental Goals This is another paragraph [etc] AbiWord unsurprisingly doesn't import the RTF file correctly (AbiWord is bad at RTF as far as I understand it). Do I need to view the RTF file in Word 2000 to see the problem? Another thing to try is 'docbook2rtf -d none ...'. Let me know if that produces any better RTF output.
docbook2rtf -d none ... fixes it. Without that "-d none", MS Word2000 showed all the pages with text starting half way down the page. Is this a bug, or just a different setting. Your call I guess.
Sounds like a page margins problem in the stylesheet. BUT, those margins work fine for non-RTF output. Perhaps it's an openjade RTF backend bug. I'll need to investigate a bit further. Thanks for the feedback.
Okay, the last work-around in this area involved tweaking the %bottom-margin%; this problem seems to be related to the %top-margin%. I will attach a modified stylesheet that I'd like you to try. Save it as 'margin.dsl', and use 'docbook2rtf -d margin.dsl ...' to try it out. Let me know if that corrects the problem. Thanks.
Created attachment 37322 [details] margin.dsl
The new margins.dsl produced rtf that MSWord2000 liked. It did produce an error during compile, though. I ran "docbook2rtf -d margin.dsl secpol.docbook" Error was: jade:margin.dsl:510:2:E: too many arguments for function
Okay, great. Yes, the error that you saw was my fault, oops.
Fixed in docbook-utils 0.6.9-9.