Re: [xsl] XSL-FO plain text processor?

[Kai Hackemesser <kaha@xxxxxx>]

Hi, J.

Thanks for your additional information! I just wondered what strange 
format they use for their grid. 8LPI, that's just a line hight of 2.5mm, 
that's quite tiny I would say. A usual line printer wouldn't print that 
small by default, but it explains why a DIN A4 page format results in 
about 110 rows. But anyway, your numbers will help me to format the page 
as desired, since I can now do some math in the master stylesheet. Thanks!

Ciao!
Kai

J.Pietschmann schrieb:
> Kai Hackemesser wrote:
> > I'm looking for a solution to create a formatted plain text file from 
> > XML. Currently I try apache FOP Processor with XSL-FO input. but I 
> > can't get it looking as I want, I always have misformations, missing 
> > or to much spaces or empty rows, even clipped characters. I would 
> > like to know if you know any alternatives to that?
>
> The FOP text renderer tries to snap the characters to a fixed grid,
> defined by hard-coded lines-per-inch (8) and chars-per-inch (16.67)
> constants. Obviously, this will only work for a fixed font (e.g.
> courier), a certain line-height and an appropriate font-size. 8 LPI
> translate to an line-height of 0.125in, which should be set
> explicitly. The font size should be a little smaller and hopefully
> match the CPI, you should try a setting around 8pt (I'm too lazy to
> check the Courier metrics right now, it's bed time).
>
> Alternatives to using XSLFO are using XSLT to convert the XML into
> text directly as already mentioned, which is a bit tedious in case
> of tables and right justified text, and using XSLT to convert to
> nroff source and let nroff/groff do the grunt work.
> Someone mentioned http://sourceforge.net/projects/xml2txt/
>
> J.Pietschmann