Re: [xsl] XSL-FO to PDF processors

Subject: Re: [xsl] XSL-FO to PDF processors
From: "W. Eliot Kimber" <eliot@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sat, 06 Apr 2002 09:17:06 -0600
"G. Ken Holman" wrote:
> 
> At 2002-04-04 09:10 -0600, Corey A. Spitzer wrote:
> >Could someone suggest a good substitute for Apache's FOP?  Something that's
> >at least version 1.0 or with really clean PDF output?
> 
> The commercial implementations from Antenna House (Windows only) and
> RenderX (Java-based) produce very clean output and are interoperable: I
> have one set of stylesheets for my electronic book publishing and training
> course handouts and I can choose either processor to produce the same
> output with the one set of stylesheets.

They are *almost* interoperable. RenderX' XEP product supports a few
attributes that Antenna House's XSL Formatter product does not (mostly
fully-expanded forms of attributes that are usually used in their
short-cut form). XEP does not yet support table border collapsing and
the products differ in how they react to the (presumed) bug in the
XSL-FO spec WRT to table-body inhereting the start-indent of its
container--XEP considers it a bug and doesn't do the inheritance, XSL
Formatter does what the standard stays (even though it is nonsensical). 

But as Ken says, it is possible to create style sheets that will work
with both products.

I found the validation option of XEP to be quite valuable in making sure
that style sheets were producing correct FO documents--XSL Formatter is
much more tollerant of the FO documents it gets. However, at the moment
XSL Formatter implements more features than XEP (althought that will
probably change rapidly as RenderX improves their product). 

If a Windows-only solution is acceptable, I'm currently recommending XSL
Formatter, especially if you are working with non-Latin languages--we've
used it now to produce documents in Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese (Simplified
and Traditional), Japanese, Korean, and Thai. XEP cannot currently
satisfy our right-to-left requirements so we haven't even tried to
configure it for the other languages, although our style sheets will now
work with both products.

If a Windows-only solution is not acceptable, then RenderX or FOP are
your only FO-to-PDF choices. The iText Java library can be used to write
custom PDF outputters, but it is not an FO implementation (but could be
used as the basis for one, I suppose, although that many layers of
library would probably make it pretty slow). I have not evaluated the
iText library beyond reading it's FAQ.

Cheers,

Eliot
-- 
W. Eliot Kimber, eliot@xxxxxxxxxx
Consultant, ISOGEN International

1016 La Posada Dr., Suite 240
Austin, TX  78752 Phone: 512.656.4139

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