Re: ANN: Evaluation Version of RenderX XSL FO Formatter

Subject: Re: ANN: Evaluation Version of RenderX XSL FO Formatter
From: "Nikolai Grigoriev" <grig@xxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 23 May 2000 16:50:04 +0400
Sebastian Rahtz wrote:

> as it stands at present, the eager punter cannot compare the 3
> available products, because their test files are mutually incompatible:
>
>  - XEP does April 1999, pretty well
>  - FOP does a mixture of drafts, quite well
>  - PassiveTeX does only March 2000, not bad in some respects

FOP does not do any draft. You cannot include SVG directly into the code and
pretend to be conformant to something.

As far as tests are concerned, I don't see any desire from other test
writers to share the results of their work. Where is the FOP test suite
published? How many other systematic test suites are available over the Net?
Frankly speaking, I expected that our testing effort would be supported by
others, so as to produce a common full-fledged conformance test suite. But
no one really cares: do you remember the whitespace-treatment /
white-space-treatment story, Sebastian?

BTW: did your initiative to run a performance comparison give some results?

> so someone evaluating XSL FO is going to be deeply unimpressed by the
> whole shebang, and probably enter the Hell of CSS.

Not before CSSn becomes able to create a table of contents with dotted tab
fills and page numbers.

>  > Another excuse is that in most cases, XSL FOs can be converted from
>  > the old to the new draft by means of an XSLT stylesheet (which I intend
>  > to publish when appropriate);

> have you got that stylesheet written and tested? you sure it is that easy?

Not yet; I am in process of writing it. I think that I have got enough XSLT
experience to judge about its feasibility; maybe I am wrong.

> yes, the new arrival on the scene can experiment with XEP. they have
> to read the April 1999 spec, so they learn XSL FO from that. they find
> problems, they report them, and find lo! the current spec has changed
> things quite a lot....
>
> ah well, we will see. I just hope the XSL FO group finish the spec soon...

I apologize to all XSL FO newcomers.

Best regards,
Nikolai


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


Current Thread