pdf toolchain notes & suggestions
Mark Johnson
mjohnson at redhat.com
Fri Sep 24 14:14:20 UTC 2004
Karsten Wade wrote:
> On Thu, 2004-09-23 at 12:12, Mark Johnson wrote:
>
> 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.
Geesh, I went to http://xml.apache.org/fop to get an idea of the
development cycle and found that the latest release (0.20.5) is
dated July 2003. So much for active development. (Yikes!)
FWIW, we (we=some RH Docs folks) did some testing a few months ago
on a doc that had the typical level of complexity that approximated
our needs: variablelists, nested lists, and a number of tables. FOP
produced excellent output with no funky formatting. OTOH, the
passivetex output was quite messed up in a variety of ways (most of
which escape me at the moment). Hence my recommedation to try FOP.
But if there is a better solution, I'm all ears. My concern is
simply to get the print toolchain in working order. Many people
(myself included) *do* want to print out a document to read, rather
than reading from a screen. Yes, we can print out the HTML, but due
to the combo of chunking & formatting, the process is inefficient
and can produce low-quality print copy.
>
> 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).
I know this may sound crazy, but if we have to, we can use the
DSSSL/jade toolchain as a last-resort fallback. Of course, doing so
will put some restrictions on the content of the source files (e.g.
no Xincludes), but I don't see this as being a problem, as the
markup used in Fedora docs is not likely to be complex.
DaveP: being the resident XSL-FO expert, what fo -> pdf (or even xml
-> pdf) tool(s) do you recommend?
> Can anyone step up to demonstrate a method to get FOP to compile and run
> using gcj and gij?
Strictly speaking, we shouldn't need to recompile it under gcj, but
it's a nice, safe thing to do if we're going to use gij as the java
interpreter.
While on vacation all next week, I'll see if I can get FOP running
under gij (I need to do this for an internal project, anyway) and
will report back when I return.
>
> *wracks his brain thinking of developers he can bargain with ...*
s/bargain with/bribe/
Cheers,
Mark
--
----------------------------------------------------------
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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