pdf toolchain notes & suggestions

[Mark Johnson]

Hi All,

I believe the broken part of the FDP XML -> PDF toolchain is due to 
the passivetex component of the TeX backend.

After discussing the situation with Sebastian Rahtz, the upstream 
developer of passivetex, I sadly report that passivetex is no longer 
being developed or maintained. The last update, in fact, was in 
November 2003.

When I asked Sebastian about the status of passivetex, here's what 
he had to say (he gave permission to post his remarks, BTW):

 > PassiveTeX does what it does, ie about 90% of FO, and thats where 
 > its frozen. Fixing the bugs are now so hard, I cannot do them. 
The > decision to parse the XML using TeX seemed like a good idea,
 > but in practice its a dead end. If I was starting again I'd work 
  > on a translator to plain TeX markup. thats doable, but a lot of
 > work.
 >
 > [...]
 >
 > I convert my XML direct to LaTeX, and process that. It gives
 > better results, faster :-}
 >
 > [...]
 >
 > others may disagree, but I don't see this particular path 
(parsing > XSLFO using xmltex) ever being able to work 100%

Hence I think it's time to consider a different toolchain for pdf 
output.

Two possibilities come to mind: FOP [1] and dblatex [2]. IMO fop 
would be the better choice as customizing the output requires XSL 
expertise, whereas dblatex requires LaTeX expertise to customize the 
output.

If we were to adopt FOP, it would be nice to get it working under 
gcj (via gij), so that we stick to a 100% free toolchain, though I 
think it will also run under kaffe [3]. Some testing would clearly 
need to be done... And if such a toolchain proves sufficient for the 
needs of the FDP, it probably wouldn't be too difficult to find 
someone to package FOP.

I hope this info helps us get to work on building a new XML -> PDF 
toolchain:)

Anyway, that's my $0.02.

Cheers,
Mark

[1] http://xml.apache.org/fop/

[2] http://dblatex.sourceforge.net/

[3] http://www.kaffe.org/
-- 
----------------------------------------------------------
Mark Johnson                     <mjohnson at redhat.com>
OS Product Documentation
Engineering, Red Hat, Inc.       <http://www.redhat.com>
Tel: 919.754.4151                Fax: 919.754.3708
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