Prince 11 production release

Prince 11 is out, so we can get out of the versioning hell we were in before. I’ve updated the dependency in dev (see #584) and we are testing internally. Just wanted to advise folks that this will be the requirement as of our release of Pressbooks 3.9.6 next week (FYI @brad—I know you had asked about the version requirement before) .

@rootl You’ve upgraded your system to Prince 11, yes? Any observations so far?

Greetings!! Wow, this is near mind-reading level; I was just about to put in a Github issue or add an issue here.

We just upgraded to Prince 11 ; but for reasons I am unsure of, we receive “Some dependencies for PDF export could not be found. Please verify that you have completed the installation instructions.” message for every book we try to export.

I tested Prince 11’s functionality and am able to produce test pdfs via command line.
Our path to prince is /bin/prince

Our Pressbooks version: 3.9.5.1, PB Textbooks 3.8

Server info: Linux RHEL7 , PHP7. No GUI desktop.
WP-CLI latest version, PB-CLI latest version

Perhaps there are permissions issues. Let me know any ideas; I can supply you with screen captures and exact pathnames as well.

We were depending on a development build of Prince (20160928), so the version check no longer works once you’ve upgraded to Prince 11. For a temporary fix, make the change seen here:

We will be releasing Pressbooks 3.9.6 with full Prince 11 support next week, and from now on will not be depending on versions of Prince which are not proper releases.

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Sorry for the trouble with this!

Thank you!!! That fixed the version check problem!

We will test exporting various books and let you know of any oddities (or good things of course) as we come across them.

Is this forum the best place to report any feedback specific to Prince 11/Pressbooks ?

Thanks again.

Yes, thanks! In general the forum is for questions/community support/configuration issues/feature discussion, GitHub for verified bugs and fully spec’ed feature requests.

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PB 3.9.6 and Prince 11 did not improve output. SVG rendered poorly and no cover page. Spacing between paragraph and keyword textboxes not consistent.

mPDF better at rendering SVG, coverpage, and spacing of keyword textboxes. However, mPDF doesn’t appear to be working now with latest PB - but perhaps that is just our setup - don’t know as I am more interested in EPUB 3, which works much better with SVG but poorly for large tables.

I just did a test with SVG in Pressbooks 3.9.6 / Prince 11 and it looks pretty good to me: SVG-Test.pdf | Slack

The mPDF exporter places the uploaded cover image on the half-title page, which is inconsistent with the decision we made with the Prince PDF exporter to omit the cover from the book content (for Print on Demand services, the cover must be provided separately and can’t just be a regular page—see, for example, the templates produced here). There is certainly a use case for digital distribution PDFs to include the cover image and this is a feature that I will add to the roadmap.

Likewise, if the spacing before and after textboxes is inconsistent for you, please provide me with some more detail so I can investigate this:

  1. What theme are you using?
  2. What is the exact block of content which is causing formatting issues (please attach a portion of the chapter contents, copied from the HTML/plain text editor)?

Thanks.

Examples:

1.)
http://epub-fhd.athabascau.ca/professionalwriting/chapter/what-do-we-mean-by-professional-writing/

You may find Stokes' (2012) <em><a target="_blank" href="https://theconversation.com/no-youre-not-entitled-to-your-opinion-9978">No, you’re not entitled to your opinion</a> </em>commentary informative.
<div class="bcc-box bcc-info">
<h3 itemprop="educationalUse"><a id="exercise1"></a>Exercise 1</h3>
Complete <a href="http://epub-fhd.athabascau.ca/professionalwriting/back-matter/practice-exercises-and-activities/#ch1ex1">Exercise 1</a> to test your learning in this area. Then check your responses against the <a href="http://epub-fhd.athabascau.ca/professionalwriting/back-matter/practice-exercises-and-activities/#ch1ex1a">Exercise 1 Feedback</a>.

</div>
&nbsp;
<h2><a id="sensitivity"></a>Modeling cultural sensitivity and eliminating bias</h2>

PDF output - no spacing

2.) http://epub-fhd.athabascau.ca/professionalwriting/chapter/how-do-you-generate-and-position-your-ideas/

    ach domain is broken down into specific types of learning goals and criteria that are used to assess whether those goals have been reached.
    <h3>Table 2.1. <em>Bloom's (1956) Taxonomy of Education Objectives</em></h3>
    <table style="background-color: #ecf7e1; border-color: #050505;">
    <tbody>
    <tr style="background-color: #aac288;">
    <td colspan="2">
    <h3 style="text-align: center;">Levels of learning in the cognitive domain</h3>
    </td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
    <td style="width: 20%;">Knowledge</td>
    <td>
    <ul>
     	<li>observe and recall information</li>
     	<li>know major ideas</li>
     	<li>master subject matter</li>
    </ul>
    </td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
    <td style="width: 20%;">Comprehension</td>
    <td>
    <ul>
     	<li>understand content and grasp meaning</li>
     	<li>interpret facts, compare, contrast</li>
     	<li>provide examples</li>
    </ul>
    </td>
    </tr>

PDF output - Table columns display opposite width percentage

3.)
http://epub-fhd.athabascau.ca/professionalwriting/chapter/how-do-you-effectively-communicate-your-ideas/

<li>Make a conscious statement about gender by defaulting to <em>they </em>or <em>them </em>rather than <em>he/she </em>or <em>him/her. </em>Here is an example: The <strong><span style="color: #3366ff;">patient</span></strong> I saw yesterday listed depression and anxiety as <strong><span style="color: #3366ff;">their</span></strong> presenting concerns. Note: you may need to educate your instructor about this choice.</li>
</ul>
<div class="textbox shaded">
<h3>Welcoming them, zim, em, hir. . .</h3>

PDF output - Black title now white

4.) http://epub-fhd.athabascau.ca/professionalwriting/chapter/chapter-5-how-do-i-structure-and-format-my-paper/

PDF SVG output - text runs outside of caption

Hi Steve,

These issues are a combination of things, none of which have to do with Prince:

  1. This appears to be a styling issue in the Open Textbook theme. See export with Clarke 2.0 using Prince of identical content:

  1. Supplying a width for the first column but not the second in your table (when I set first columns to 30% and second columns to 70% I get this output with Clarke using Prince):

  1. Again, looks like a style conflict resulting from use of the Open Textbook theme (see screenshot of identical content in Clarke):

  1. The last item is harder to address—it looks like the text elements of your SVG file are picking up styles from elsewhere in the theme and I can confirm that the same issue is present when using Clarke:

Hope this helps.

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