[publican-list] Possible alternative to FOP!

[Joshua Wulf]

Jeff, what about this:

Page Breaking

The current page breaking algorithm of WebKit leaves much to be desired.
Basically webkit will render everything into one long page, and then cut
it up into pages. This means that if you have two columns of text where
one is vertically shifted by half a line. Then webkit will cut a line
into to pieces display the top half on one page. And the bottom half on
another page. It will also break image in two and so on. If you are
using the patched version of QT you can use the CSS page-break-inside
property to remedy this somewhat. There is no easy solution to this
problem, until this is solved try organising your HTML documents such
that it contains many lines on which pages can be cut cleanly.

See also: http://code.google.com/p/wkhtmltopdf/issues/detail?id=9,
http://code.google.com/p/wkhtmltopdf/issues/detail?id=33 and
http://code.google.com/p/wkhtmltopdf/issues/detail?id=57.


On 08/12/2011 11:11 AM, Jeff Fearn wrote:
> 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.
> 
> After a few tweaks to the HTML-Single style-sheet the out put is on-par 
> with FOP. Clearly there are limitations to what this can do, but the 
> benefits of this over FOP are significant, and I think overall we'd get 
> a lot more return for our effort in fixing layout issues with this tool 
> than continuing smashing our faces against the impenetrable mountain of 
> pain of FOP.
> 
> Initail thoughts wkhtmltopdf Vs FOP:
> 
> Cons:
> 
> Foot notes become end notes
> 
> 
> Pros:
> 
> Not Java
> Layout matches HTML
> Not Java
> Layout synced with HTML
> Not Java
> Non Intel arches possible
> Not Java
> Fast
> Not Java
> Small memory footprint
> Not Java
> Maintainable
> Not Java
> 
> Discuss!
> 
> Cheers, Jeff.
> 
> 1: http://fedorapeople.org/~jfearn/PUG_test.pdf
> 
> _______________________________________________
> publican-list mailing list
> publican-list at redhat.com
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/publican-list
> Wiki: https://fedorahosted.org/publican


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