[publican-list] Possible alternative to FOP!

[Ryan Lerch]

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.
>

This looks awesome!

I love that there will only be 1 styling mechanism (CSS) across all the 
4 default outputs. Makes it much easier to create new, and maintain styles.

cheers,
ryanlerch