Bugs in asciidoc latex backend

AsciiDoc
Text based document generation

  »Home »Man Page »User Guide »Installation »FAQ »a2x »API »Cheatsheet »Tests »ChangeLog »Support »Page Source | # Bugs in asciidoc latex backend Geoff Eddy version 8.4.5, 27 May 2009 Benjamin Klum was unable to maintain the LaTeX backend beyond version 8.2.7, and as a consequence the `latex.conf` file ceased to work with `asciidoc` sometime after this. For version 8.4.3 I made some changes to the file to get it working again. This document summarises the remaining issues which I have found with generating LaTeX and thence PDF output with `asciidoc`, which is done as follows: `asciidoc --backend=latex --unsafe FILE.txt` `latex FILE.tex` `kpdf FILE.pdf` Many of these were found by processing the `asciidoc.txt` file and comparing the HTML output with the PDF. ## Footnotes Priority Low. Problem References to footnotes, and a sensible value for the `[footnoteref-inlinemacro]` section, don’t seem to be possible. Cause LaTeX doesn’t support footnoting much beyond creating a footnote at a certain point in text and displaying the footnote itself. Solution Unclear. How important or necessary is this, anyway? ## Spurious text at starts of paragraphs Priority Medium Problem It is necessary to insert spurious text in paragraphs. Cause This `asciidoc` input:
      -------------------------------------------------------------------
      Text
      -------------------------------------------------------------------
  generates this LaTeX code:
      \begin{lstlisting}
      SPURIOUS TEXTText\end{lstlisting}
  which should be:
      \begin{lstlisting}[]
      Text\end{lstlisting}
  Solution Find out a way to generate the correct LaTeX output as above. The obvious solution, as explained in `latet.conf`, doesn’t work. ## Tables Priority Rather high. Problem Not all of the table configuration options can be passed through to the LaTeX backend. In particular, I’ve had to assume that all tables will be fifteen or fewer left-justified columns wide. Cause The table models in LaTeX and HTML are too dissimilar for one `asciidoc` specification to generate valid output in both formats by simple regexp replacement. Related to this is the unfortunate fact that `<COLGROUP>` and related tags aren’t a required part of HTML4, and some broswers (at least Firefox and Konqueror) don’t implement them. Solution Perhaps table processing could be handled by a Python plugin, which would read in a table spec and generate the appropriate text? ## Unicode escaping Priority Rather high, to me at least. Problem The commented-out section in `latex.conf`, if uncommented, converts `&#960;` to `\unichar{960}`, which then causes LaTeX to complain that the resulting command is unavailable in encoding T1. The more common non-ASCII characters, such as those in `félicité` and `świeca`, are handled properly, but some - such as the IPA characters in the `tipa` package - are not. Cause The encodings in the LaTeX output are wrong. Solution Correct the encodings. ## Text colours Priority Probably low Problem The text colour options are not processed by LaTeX; for example `[#ff0000]#Red text#` is not rendered in red. Cause LaTeX and HTML represent RGB triads differently: HTML is happy with `#ff8000`, but LaTeX needs `[rgb]{1,0.5,0}`. Solution Provide some sort of internal RGB conversion mechanism which can convert RGB triads to different representations. ## Text sizes Priority Probably low Problem The text size options are not processed by LaTeX: `[,,1]#text#` is rendered in the same size as normal text. Cause HTML size tags - `h1` through `h7` - are directly derivable from the size number, whereas LaTeX has a series of descriptive words (`HUGE` through `normalsize` to `scriptsize`). Solution Provide a way to treat the number as an index into an array. ## Background colour in paragraphs Priority Medium Problem If the `backgroundcolor` attribute is specified in the `lstset` command, all paragraphs are displayed as black rectangles by `kpdf`, `xpdf`, and `evince`, although `kdvi` has no problems. I’ve had to remove the attribute, and so paragraphs all appear on white backgrounds. The PDF viewers also complain:
      Error (NNNN): Unknown operator 'rgb'
Cause Apparently a known bug in the output of `pdflatex`. Not a bug in `asciidoc`. Solution Wait until this bug is fixed?