Re: document production options

["Sebastian Rahtz" <sebastian.rahtz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Francis Norton writes:

 > We're currently developing a document production function for one or
 > more commercial web applications.

you might want to look at http://www.reportlab.com/; their work is
relevant in contexts like that (though I dont personally like the approach)

 > [1]	How stable and/or viable is the XSL/FO spec? I see that it is
 > currently in last call working draft, and is supported with different
 > levels of completeness by the tools mentioned in the
 > http://www.w3.org/Style/XSL/ list of XSL-FO processors. This seems a
 > reasonably strong case to me - have I overlooked any other major
 > confidence or fear factors?

yes, the fact that none of the implementations is at all complete;
therefore the spec is untested; therefore we do not know that it can
solve all the real-world tasks it sets out to address. cf DSSSL.

 > [2]	In the case of some letters and all statements we need to evaluate
 > the space required to print variable length and/or variable count data
 > items in order to get the page break in the right place. As Max
 > Froumentin mentioned here recently, this is a well known problem (see
 > http://redrice.com/xml/xslReporting.html for my analysis of the
 > requirement) which is not addressed in XSL-FO. Does anyone have a
 > framework for addressing it, for instance by the use of APIs to the
 > XSL-FO processor? Or does any competitive technology address this
 > problem?

it would be an absolute doddle in TeX, which has the much closer
binding of markup language and formatting engine which you need. but
hey, thats 20 years old and hasn't changed for 10 years, so its
boring, no?

 > [3]	I'm aware that RenderX plan to release a utility to convert
 > HTML+CSS2 to XML-FO. Are there any other routes for generating XSL-FO
 > documents graphically or is that way down the road? How about RTF or
 > PDF to XSL-FO?

RTF to FO might be easy. but PDF to FO? two different levels. and if
yoh had PDF, why would you want FO?

 > [4]	Are there any obvious alternative technologies? 

Yes. make your own PDF in your own XML application, using something
like PDFlib. That gives you access to font metrics, unless I
misremember badly. Construct your pages by hand; I suspect FO is a
sledgehammer to crack a nut, from what I can tell of your application.

Sebastian


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