Re: [xsl] Office 2007, XSL-FO, and the Adobe "Save as PDF" (non)native-support...

Subject: Re: [xsl] Office 2007, XSL-FO, and the Adobe "Save as PDF" (non)native-support...
From: "G. Ken Holman" <gkholman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sun, 04 Jun 2006 21:20:39 -0400
At 2006-06-03 19:06 -0600, M. David Peterson wrote:
I assume yes...  But I'm not qualified to answer this.  The connection
that I originally made that caused the desire to ping this list was
based on the simple notion that I do know that XSL-FO is used to
create PDF documents.  Unfortunately my experience with the FO side of
XSL is limited... REALLY limited.

:{)} I'm teaching XSL next week, June 12-16 ... plenty of seats available!


My thought was "If there is information that is valuable to a
publisher (e.g. meta-data such as that associated with citations) and
this information can be embedded into a PDF document using standard
citation style footnotes and such, then does the fact that the new XML
format allows for ease of extension (and as such, allows the ability
to easily embed meta-data during a copy/paste operation) + the ability
to "Save as PDF..." + the connection that FO has to PDF = Opportunity
for the XSL-FO community?

Not sure where you are going with this idea ... FO works well for final form, but not as a revisable form. PDF's new smart interactive features blur the line a bit ... where the form/layout is final but content/filling is revisable (thus would be done through custom extensions to XSL-FO by a vendor).


You state "[embed meta data] + the ability to "Save as PDF..." + the connection that FO has to PDF = Opportunity for the XSL-FO community?"

Since PDF is a target *rendering* for the *formatting* of XSL-FO, I think it is irrelevant that another tool also produces PDF. There is no backwards path from PDF to FO.

However, your point now has me wondering... is XSL-FO as embedded into
the printing industry as I (incorrectly?) assumed it was?

Again, this is all fairly new territory to me...  Initially this
seemed like a question best answered by a G. Ken Holman or a Norm
Walsh-type expert, but it seems you also have quite a bit of
experience in this area as well...

Have I connected the wrong technology dots?

That's difficult to say ... you might have subtle requirements of which I am unaware.


And it is a bit vague to refer to "the printing industry".

XSL-FO is not intersecting the interactive word-processing world and bespoke book layout very much (my two books were laid out using XSL-FO, but that is surely not the norm, my content was already in XML before the contracts were negotiated), but it is making its mark in high-volume printing requirements. I've heard of hundreds of thousands of monthly bills being printed in XSL-FO. Stylesheets I've written for a New York customer produced 3 million pages in 60,000 customized 50-page books.

Are those companies in the "printing industry"? Not traditionally, but they have new printing requirements they didn't have in the past.

At 10:46 AM -0600 6/3/06, M. David Peterson wrote:
Does providing the ability to save a Word document as PDF natively, out-of-the-box (apparently they will counteract the apparent demand by Adobe by providing the support as a separate download) provide even greater opportunity for XSL-FO by increasing the number of PDF documents, or does it hurt XSL-FO my making it less relevant to the needs of the printing industry?

To me a Word document would be written for very different reasons than an XML document targeted for formatting with XSL-FO. Word is great for bespoke documents, XML+XSLT+XSL-FO is great for multiple XML documents with the same layout ... it doesn't make a lot of sense to me to write custom XML+XSLT+XSL-FO for a scenario where the layout and content of every document is different.


So, for my customers needing the rigour of XML+XSLT+XSL-FO for the same layout for lots of XML, a revisable-form word-processing tool just isn't even considered.

I hope this helps.

. . . . . . . . . . . Ken

--
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