[publican-list] Possible alternative to wkhtmltopdf

[Peter Moulder]

On Tue, Dec 06, 2011 at 04:47:29PM +0100, Raphael Hertzog wrote:
> On Wed, 07 Dec 2011, Peter Moulder wrote:
> > I mentioned earlier that I was working on an HTML renderer to do
> > pagination.  Let's call it Morp.  Although it isn't user-ready, the
> > output is starting to look like a tempting alternative, at least for
> > print usage.
> 
> I looked at the generated PDF and yes it looks promising.
> 
> So can you tell us more about this HTML renderer and its availability for
> others to play with?

Morp is being developed and used for various research projects to do with
layout.

Re availability: I've only just got public git working just now, and have
got as far as publishing one of the two repositories (that of a modified
libcroco) but not the other one.  The modified libcroco is at
git://bowman.infotech.monash.edu.au/libcroco.git and I'll see if I can do
the other one tomorrow.

I was hoping that if the software is useful to Red Hat then they might
want to help with some aspects of making it user-ready, like
the work in making sure that the changes to libcroco are in a form
acceptable to upstream, or maybe changing how http transfers are done.

(Currently I use curl to create blah.header and blah.data files somewhere
under ~/url-cache, but I deliberately don't handle Max-Age stuff because
re-fetching would interfere with the reproduceability of results of
experiments associated with said research.)

Things I'll be working on myself as part of the needs of the research
include footnotes and multi-column (which FOP output uses for the index),
and slowly making the tool more reliable: the current approach to
pagination is a sort of stub implementation that allows me to work on
other things, but it'll need to be rewritten to make it work in general.

pjrm.