Re: XSL-FO Does it have the guts?

[jmbolles@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

Isn't this what PGML is meant to handle?

What's nice about XSL is that the logic behind the decision can be
captured, rather than one view of the decision. Writing the XSL for a pgml
implementation would be a colossal pain, but by no means impossible.

Jack Bolles

owner-xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

> Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote:
>
>  > The only things I see that the
>  > Quark-heads would likely miss are:
>  >
>  > 1. Non-rectangular areas
>  > 2. Arbitrary rotation of areas
>  >
>  > Is there anything else one can imagine doing in Quark that isn't
> plausible
>  > in XSL?
>
> Style sheets will never be able to rival DTP packages when the target
> is paper. Let me give you one example. Using DTP, you can align glyphs
> so that the top of one glyph just barely touches the bottom of the
> glyph in the line above. This is a quite common effect, e.g. on
> Microsoft packaging. In order to achieve the effect, you need to look
> into the shape of each glyph. Since the word "Microsoft" has no
> descenders in it, the design is different from what it would have been
> if the company was called "Opera". Style sheet languages don't let you
> query the shape of the glyphs and therefore do not allow you to
> express the kind of constraints the example calls for.
>
> If you have access to the fonts, you can tune your style sheet so that
> the letters happen to abut. This might work for you locally, but
> putting such style sheets on the Web will surprise users. If my copy
> of Helvetica happens to have more "internal leading" than yours, we
> will end up with different-looking documents. Which might not be too
> bad, but it's not something Quark users will put up with.
>
> -h&kon
>
> Håkon Wium Lie             http://www.operasoftware.com/people/howcome
> howcome@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx                      simply a better browser
>
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