Improving a part of KDE documentation generation as an SOK mentee

kde

30 Jan 2026

The docs-kde-org project currently relies on an old, hard forked version of dblatex, which is bundled directly within the repository. This makes maintenance difficult.

What’s dblatex?

From the man page: dblatex is a program that transforms your SGML/XML DocBook documents to DVI, PostScript or PDF by translating them into pure LaTeX as a first process. MathML 2.0 markups are supported, too. It started as a clone of DB2LaTeX.

My task is to swap the bundled dblatex with the one present in the upstream repos and make the PDF generation work reliably. Then switch the rendering backend from pdfLaTeX to XeLaTeX to support native unicode (to fix rendering issues for languages like Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc).

If that doesn’t work out, I’ll extract the dblatex fork into its own repository to ease maintenance.

Checkpoints to achieve

Swap our current fork and use the latest upstream version. Also compare these two.
Migrate from pdfLaTeX to XeLaTeX
Verify our fixes and confirm if all the PDFs are being generated properly.

I’ll be sharing my progress and struggles (setting this website up was probably a struggle in itself) from time to time as I start this project. This work is part of Season of KDE, mentored by Johnny Jazeix.

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