kicad-doc-devs team mailing list archive

[Jon Evans <jon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello Carsten,

On Sun, Feb 21, 2021 at 2:34 AM Carsten Schoenert
<c.schoenert@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> please keep in mind that the build process in some distributions has
> restrictions like no access to resources outside the local machine and
> to external packages.
> Means e.g. 'gem install foo' will not work. The build must work only
> based on packaged stuff.


I am not sure what is packaged where, but moving to asciidoctor at all
will require new dependencies.  As far as I know, using rubygems
should be possible on most distributions, but installing the
dependencies with bundler is not going to be part of the build
process, just a "shortcut" to installing those dependencies on
platforms where it works.

Any non-packaged dependencies (such as CJK fonts, which it is looking
like we will have to customize) will need to be kept in the docs tree.

>
> A typical way of dealing with the work is to do the easy stuff first and
> work further on the more difficult parts.
> So far I see this the build of PDF and EPUB for non Japanese languages
> is mostly still working. So I suggest to drop Japanese for now and
> document this clearly but also the state why this isn't working again (yet).

OK, this is an option, but keep in mind it's not just Japanese, but
also Chinese (which is actively maintained by taotieren) that is not
possible right now with asciidoctor-pdf.  We would have to drop those
PDFs and just maintain the HTML documentation.

>
> From the maintainer of the Latex related packages in Debian I know that
> the Japanese fonts are a bit complicated as unfortunately poorly
> maintained. I can ask for detailed status in case some specific font has
> some minor issues.
>

As far as I can tell, the recommended workflow for CJK support in
asciidoctor-pdf is to maintain your own font, because the libraries
are very picky about font details and using "stock" fonts such as the
Noto CJK series (which are popular because they contain very many
characters) is not possible.

I will ask if there are any alternatives that people are using.

-Jon