Bugs in asciidoc latex backend

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 browsers (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 π 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?