Re: Future of DSSSL: What about PDF?

[Carlos Villegas <cav@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Brandon Ibach wrote:
>    Beyond all this, however, I'd like to find out what you all think
> of an alternative to the closely coupled formatter and engine.  I
> recall that we had a discussion along these lines some months ago, and
> one of the alternatives was to create higher level FOs that could
> "encapsulate" some of the more complicated formatting tasks which
> might otherwise require such a coupling with the formatter.

After I took a first look at DSSSL, one of my questions was if
there is some feedback mechanism from the formatter to the DSSSL
processor.
I was told that DSSSL basic principle is to provide enough information
in the SOSOFOs so there's no need for feedback. Later I found about
the indirect flow objects, but I don't know how much you can do with
them. I like to think that higher level FOs with enough characteristics
will suffix. However, you sometimes end up with a too general FO that
doesn't do exactly what you want, because it can't possible cover all
cases,
or an FO with hundreds of attributes, difficult to get the right
values for each one. Well, maybe I'm being too extreme but it is the
case when dealing with high quality typesetting. However, I agree
a loosely coupled system offer major advantages. It's about the same
principle of SGML, separate content from how it should look: separate
styling from rendering.


Carlos Villegas
Uniscope, Inc.


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