Book Encoding Fixed + Hint for Our German Readers

January 19, 2009 By Tim OBrien

2 minute read time

Here's a hint of the next steps for Maven: The Definitive Guide. We're translating the title to German. Right now, we've got a single chapter available, but look for more content over the coming days. More information on the effort and the people behind the effort to follow. Once this translation is finished, we will have a full book in Chinese (thanks to the efforts of Juven Xu) and a full book in English.

Formatting Issues Fixed

Many of you have noticed that the book had some encoding issues over the past few days as we switched to the new look and feel. These encoding issues would show up as "???" throughout the HTML content. These issues were caused by the default encoding of the maven-resources-plugin. We're making heavy use of resource filtering when we publish the book; variables like Maven Version "2.0.9" and the installation directory of Maven are captured in Maven Properties in a pom.xml, and we filter the DocBook XML in our book's Maven build. Unfortunately, I had overlooked the encoding setting for the Maven Resource Plugin, in addition to not specifying an escapeString. This had the unfortunate side-effect of expanding references to Maven properties within the text and outputting invalid characters in our markup.

These problems have been fixed (throughout the suite of Sonatype documents), by adding the encoding configuration and making sure that we have an escapeString.

<plugin>
  <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
  <artifactId>maven-resources-plugin</artifactId>
  <version>2.3</version>
  <configuration>
    <escapeString>\</escapeString>
    <encoding>UTF-8</encoding>
  </configuration>
</plugin>

Tags: Nexus Repo Reel, Everything Open Source, Maven, german, Book

Written by Tim OBrien

Tim is a Software Architect with experience in all aspects of software development from project inception to developing scaleable production architectures for large-scale systems during critical, high-risk events such as Black Friday. He has helped many organizations ranging from small startups to Fortune 100 companies take a more strategic approach to adopting and evaluating technology and managing the risks associated with change.