RE: Future of DSSSL: What about PDF?

["Didier PH Martin" <martind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Avi,

I am trying to understand if your answer is: Yes it is useful or no it is
not and here is why.

About what you said:

a) A jade derived engine can have attached "back-ends", as you know,
actually we there is output in: MIF, RTF, Tex, HTML, XML and SGML. However,
to obtain a PDF document you need a Tex to PDF converter. Here is the
process:

document--->Dsssl engine (jade based)---->Tex------>TexPdf------>pdf

So the question now is: is this process more useful?

document----->dsssl engine (jade based)----->pdf

Or said differently, if an environment provide direct PDF production from a
DSSSL script, is this useful or not?

Regards
Didier PH Martin
mailto:martind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.netfolder.com

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-dssslist@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:owner-dssslist@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Avi Kivity
Sent: Thursday, March 04, 1999 4:22 PM
To: 'dssslist@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx'
Subject: RE: Future of DSSSL: What about PDF?


On Thursday, March 04, 1999 22:58, Didier PH Martin
[SMTP:martind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] wrote:
> Do you think that a PDF backend for a DSSSL engine is something that
> can be
> useful? To be more precise, having PDF output from a DSSSL script
> processing.

A tightly coupled 'mid-end', or formatter, is highly desirable, to support
non-simple page-sequences and generated flow objects.
Various back ends (pdf, postscript, X, win32 gdi) should be easy to attach
to the formatter since they implement essentially the same model.

Once you get to the page description level the format no longer affects
output quality (correct me if I am wrong), so the format should not matter.
There are near-lossless converters for the formats specified above.

---
"The only words which have meaning are the last ones spoken"


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