Re: [xsl] XHTML to PDF

Subject: Re: [xsl] XHTML to PDF
From: Wendell Piez <wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 17:50:38 -0400
Sean,

At 05:03 PM 7/24/2003, you wrote:
...it seems rather obvious that there should be XSLs out there that
facilitate the transformation of XHTML strict to XSL-FO to PDF. (I'm not
the only one who wants to publish to web and pdf.) But when I search
around I'm not seeing many. Where are all the XSLs for XHTML?

It's an excellent question. We may well see the technology you imagine. In time. Sort of.


But I'm afraid the layer of complexity here is XHTML itself. You may recall how HTML wasn't exactly designed by anyone: rather, it kind of "grew" as different vendors threw in different new tags for different features, sometimes in an apparent effort to outdo one another. Accordingly, even rationalized as XHTML -- even as XHTML-strict -- it's not a tag set that reflects much of any philosophy (set of specific requirements, for presentation or otherwise) beyond "wouldn't it be nice to do this on a web page".

Accordingly, the mapping from XHTML to PDF or any print output format is not trivial. You could do something, but generally you'd get pretty lame print out of it. Like the stuff you get when you import HTML into a word processor. If the HTML is really clean (and "well-formed" is only part of the story here), you can do a tolerable job getting most of the way to print. If it's not ... well, webheads wonder why XMLers are so "religious" (read: stuck up) about validation and clean design. This is why. Show us slack, messy design -- or markup escaped into text! -- and all we see is visions of complex, nasty code that someone will have to write to handle all the exceptions, and error messages to go with it.

There may well be partial solutions, however; and in principle, especially if your body of HTML docs reflects a strong tagging discipline, it should be possible to get decent results with some moderate effort.

In fact, hopefully someone will come along with this stylesheet. I'm sure it's been looked at. The FO formatter vendors probably have an idea of where to go -- they're certain to have heard the question before. On the other hand, even with the stylesheet, your mileage will vary.

Cheers,
Wendell



======================================================================
Wendell Piez                            mailto:wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Mulberry Technologies, Inc.                http://www.mulberrytech.com
17 West Jefferson Street                    Direct Phone: 301/315-9635
Suite 207                                          Phone: 301/315-9631
Rockville, MD  20850                                 Fax: 301/315-8285
----------------------------------------------------------------------
  Mulberry Technologies: A Consultancy Specializing in SGML and XML
======================================================================


XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list



Current Thread