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 XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list
Current Thread |
---|
|
<- Previous | Index | Next -> |
---|---|---|
Re: [xsl] XSL-FO to PDF processors, G. Ken Holman | Thread | RE: [xsl] XSL-FO to PDF processors, Lomvardias, Christop |
Re: [xsl] repeat and replace loop (, Jeni Tennison | Date | Re: [xsl] Stuck with Jeni's Logic.., Jeni Tennison |
Month |