Re: a DSSSL typesetter

[s.rahtz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Sebastian Rahtz)]

Aleksandar Bakic writes:
 > Is anyone (a company or an individual) working on a typesetting
 > software that understands DSSSL specifications? I have been thinking
 > of learning TeX's internals and developing software that would produce
 > DVI files from DSSSL specifications. (I am not sure whether DVI format
 > can support all what is in DSSSL, but plan to find out.) My preferred

I don't see any problem with dvi supporting DSSSL flow objects, since
its very very low level, but you'd have (of course) to write a
complete paragraph and page layout engine. This would have to be as
complex as TeX. 

Some suggestions:

 - if you want to write to a low-level format, PDF is probably much
    more useful than dvi
 - you can use the Jade DSSSL processor and its TeX backend, and work
    with the jadetex macros to process the result
 - you could work on the lout backend for Jade, and use lout as your
    typesetter

My gut feeling is that TeX (or better, its Unicode-using child, Omega)
is *almost* able to deal with all the theoretical requirements of
DSSSL, but I would not put money on it. Until someone writes a 
DSSSL engine that implements the entire spec, its hard to find out.

Sebastian


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