pdf toolchain notes & suggestions

[Tammy Fox]

On Thu, 2004-09-23 at 16:30, Karsten Wade wrote:
> 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).
> 

Agreed. If we are going to choose a toolchain, let's try to stick to
open source if possible and one that isn't going to be on the
un-maintained list any time soon.

Mark, thanks for bringing this up again. I hope we can find a reliable
solution soon.

Tammy

> > 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/
> gpg fingerprint: 2680 DBFD D968 3141 0115  5F1B D992 0E06 AD0E 0C41
>