[publican-list] Possible alternative to FOP!

[Raphael Hertzog]

Hi,

On Fri, 12 Aug 2011, Jeff Fearn wrote:
> Foot notes become end notes

This is rather annoying. On a HTML page you can click the link and use the
back button. On a printed copy you can forget this...

> Pros:
> Layout matches HTML
> Layout synced with HTML

On Fri, 12 Aug 2011, Ryan Lerch wrote:
> I love that there will only be 1 styling mechanism (CSS) across all
> the 4 default outputs. Makes it much easier to create new, and
> maintain styles.

This is good for us, but not necessarily for the reader. As a reader, I
don't have the same expectation from an HTML output and a PDF output.

The PDF should be a high quality rendering so that the result is perfect
should it be printed as a real book (via a print-on-demand service for
example).

On a page oriented document, a two column layout is often used but this
would never be used in HTML and is next to impossible to create AFAIK.

Also you how do you deal with stuff like page numbering and references to
page numbers? And having a differente layout for odd/even pages?

On Fri, 12 Aug 2011, Jeff Fearn wrote:
> Not Java
> Fast
> Not Java
> Small memory footprint
> Not Java
> Maintainable
> Not Java

I don't really like java either but IMO it should not be used as a reason to
switch to somethings with less features.

Most of the people doing docbook use some sort of LaTeX based backend for
the PDF generation. And it's also what many people expect when it comes to
create a real book.

Why was FOP preferred over LaTeX?

> On 08/12/2011 01:03 PM, Joshua Wulf wrote:
> This is because the test is using a patched QT, installed outside
> the normal library path, and I modified the CSS file to break those
> ways to see if it was easy to overcome such issues.

Urgh, this is the kind of stuff that distributors (like Debian) do not
like at all...

Are those changes things that are upstreamable in QT/Webkit?

Cheers,
-- 
Raphaël Hertzog ◈ Debian Developer

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