pdf toolchain notes & suggestions

[Karsten Wade]

On Thu, 2004-09-23 at 12:12, Mark Johnson wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> I believe the broken part of the FDP XML -> PDF toolchain is due to 
> the passivetex component of the TeX backend.

Thanks for bringing this up.  Obviously most of our target output is
HTML, but many readers rely upon PDF.  It's been bugging me for a while
that we couldn't do this properly.

[snip background on broken tools]

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

Agreed.

> 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.

Obviously there are going to be many ways to approach this.  One reason
I support the FOP choice is because of the momentum of development. 
This is more of a personal gut-feeling than proper research.

Mainly, I think our tool choices should tie into our technical
philosophy (open, works, XML) and provide us with a wide pool of
knowledgeable users (DocBook, XML, XSL, FOP).

> 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.

Can anyone step up to demonstrate a method to get FOP to compile and run
using gcj and gij?

*wracks his brain thinking of developers he can bargain with ...*

- Karsten
-- 
Karsten Wade, RHCE, Tech Writer
a lemon is just a melon in disguise
http://people.redhat.com/kwade/
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