[publican-list] Possible alternative to FOP!

[Misty Stanley-Jones]

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Jeff Fearn" <jfearn at redhat.com>
> To: "Publican List" <publican-list at redhat.com>
> Sent: Friday, August 12, 2011 11:11:50 AM
> Subject: [publican-list] Possible alternative to FOP!
> Hi everybody, as you all no doubt know we have been searching for an
> alternative to FOP for some time. FOP has proven very expensive to
> support and package, and has basically been a thorn in our side for
> ages :(
> 
> Enter http://code.google.com/p/wkhtmltopdf/ a new approach to
> HTML->PDF
> conversion. Now I've been rather negative about this approach since
> quite frankly the output of existing tools is poor, but this tool
> takes
> the output to a new level!
> 
> I urge you to take a look at the test PDF [1] I generated for the
> Publican Users' Guide before you write off this approach.

It looks very good to me! I suppose my only concern would be locking into yet another external project. Would we rely upon it as a dependency, or would we repackage it as part of Publican? The first way seems to rely upon the cooperation (collusion?) of the current project owner. The latter way seems to make more work for us, but we could also control if and when our fork of it gets updated. I am not sure how dependency / integration on third-party tools has worked in the past.

Misty