Re: DOCBOOK: low/high resolution images

[Norman Walsh <ndw at nwalsh dot com>]

/ Tony Graham <tgraham@mulberrytech.com> was heard to say:
| <mediaobject>.  I favour identifying the image by name and letting the
| stylesheet and processing system find (or create) the best image for
| the job.  Certainly, from an EPS original, you could create bitmap
| versions with arbitrary resolution and colour depth using a batch
| process.

It's partly a matter of what you can wrestle out of your
stylesheet language. Without extension, neither DSSSL nor XSL
offer a method of testing whether or not a file exists, so it's
a little difficult for the stylesheet to interrogate the
filesystem looking for the best resolution image.

If I was building a complete processing environment, I might
very well have some preprocessing steps to make the process more
flexible.

| Why enshrine in your source only the versions that you think
| you'll support?

That's a good point.

I can think of a couple of reasons for putting more information in
the source:

1. Less obscure legacy. You come back to a system three years
   from now and you find just a filename in a reference to an
   external graphic and you have to scratch your head...what did
   this used to refer to?

2. Better interoperability. If you share documents across multiple
   vendors or systems, you might hard pressed to do extremely
   flexible processing in a reasonable way on all systems.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>      | Nature is amoral, not immoral.
http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/ | [It] existed for eons before we
Member, DocBook Editorial Board    | arrived, didn't know we were
                                   | coming, and doesn't give a damn
                                   | about us.--Stephen J. Gould