Just a quick follow-up post to give a happy end to my previous woes. Without further ado, I give you Scribus rendering all 43 cases of border joins mentioned in the previous post (I had forgot two of them before):

Cheers.

So I asked Tomas to help me, and together we heaved this beast onto a pallet wagon and dragged it over to my office and lifted in onto a desk. It weighs about 35-40 kg! I hooked it up to the network, installed some drivers and tried to print a test page. After half an hour of looking at “Busy” on the printer LCD, I turned it off and then back on and was greeted with “990 Service Engine Error”.

This error sounded really grave to me, and I considered giving up and send this thing to the printer graveyard. But first I googled the error, and got a hit on some site for amateur printer repairing. After reading a bit, I decided to open the thing up. This is what it looks like:

Innards of the C710

From a bit of reading and manually playing around with the “clutch” for the service engine during start-up, which you can do by turning a green little knob, and also measuring the resistance of the service motor itself, I’ve decided that something must be wrong with the engine controller. I love how that green little knob has been put in there just for debugging. Now the best option seems to be to replace the entire engine block, marked on the picture below:

Service engine block

After some more googling I found a pirated service manual and parts catalog, and I’ve asked a dealer to quote a price for me for the part I need (#12G1225 BLOCK ASM OPC/COUPLING DRIVE). It seems hard to find these kind of things since the printer is pretty old.

Anyway, I’ll post more when I’ve found the part and tried to fix it. Gotto catch a bus now. BBL.

One small problem arised though. I installed the SyntaxHighlight_GeSHi extension to allow source code to be marked up and highlighted using <source />, and my <api /> tag extension would not work inside a <source /> as another extension was already in effect. Not only that; even if it had worked, having to mark up all occurances of libxml2 API symbols inside source code would be cumbersome and it would be hard to discern the source code when editing the wiki markup with all those <api /> tags littered about.

So I figured I’d just patch the SyntaxHighlight_GeSHi extension to do automatic identification and linkifying of libxml2 API symbols instead. It turned out to be easier than I thought. The API symbols for libxml2 can be obtained as an XML file by running the doc/apibuild.py script in the libxml2 source tree. This file has the following format (condensed example excerpt):

  
    
      
      
      ...
    
    
      
      
      ...
    
    ...
  

So I first made the following PHP script that takes this XML and generates a PHP associative array definition with [symbol] => [url] mappings.

 url, ... ).
 *
 * Usage: php
 */

$apibase = 'http://xmlsoft.org/html'; // The base for the API URLs.

// Open input
$xml = new XMLReader();
$xml->open('libxml2-api.xml');

if ($xml == FALSE) {
  echo "Unable to open libxml2-api.xml\n";
  exit(FALSE);
}

$file = NULL;
$symbol = NULL;
$type = NULL;

echo "read()) {
  if ($xml->nodeType == XMLReader::ELEMENT && $xml->name == 'file')
    while($xml->moveToNextAttribute())
      if ($xml->name == 'name')
        $file = $xml->value;
  if ($xml->nodeType == XMLReader::ELEMENT && $xml->name == 'exports')
    while($xml->moveToNextAttribute())
      if ($xml->name == 'symbol')
        $symbol = $xml->value;
      elseif ($xml->name == 'type')
        $type = $xml->value;
  if ($file != NULL && $symbol != NULL && $type != NULL) {
    echo "  \"$symbol\" => \"$apibase/libxml-$file.html#$symbol\",\n";
    $symbol = NULL;
  }
}
echo ");\n\n?>";

$xml->close();
?>

I ran this script against the libxml2-api.xml from libxml2 2.7.2 and put the output into extensions/Libxml2ApiSymbols.php. Then it was just a matter of patching the SyntaxHighlight_GeSHi/SyntaxHighlight_GeSHi.class.php slightly to make it do automatic detection and linkifying of API symbols. I also took the opportunity to patch it to default to the C language when highlighting, as it will be the most common one at the libxml2 wiki. Below is the full diff.

--- SyntaxHighlight_GeSHi.class.php.orig        2008-11-11 17:13:09.000000000 +0100
+++ SyntaxHighlight_GeSHi.class.php     2008-11-11 17:56:36.000000000 +0100
@@ -1,5 +1,7 @@
 mOutput->addHeadItem( self::buildHeadItem( $geshi ), "source-{$lang}" );
+      // Add libxml2 API links
+      if ($lang == 'c')
+        foreach ($libxml2ApiSymbols as $symbol => $url) {
+          $out = preg_replace("/$symbol([^a-zA-Z0-9_])/", "$symbol$1", $out);
+        }
                        if ( $enclose === GESHI_HEADER_NONE ) {
                                return ' '.$out . '';
                        } else {

The last thing I did was a bit of styling of the links in the MediaWiki:Geshi.css:

a.libxml2-symbol {
  color: #a06060;
  text-decoration: none;
}
a.libxml2-symbol:visited {
  color: #a06060;
}

The result can be seen here. Hope someone finds this useful. If anyone feels like helping out with the wiki by the way; please register and edit away!