On Thu, 2004-09-23 at 12:12, Mark Johnson wrote:
Obviously there are going to be many ways to approach this. One reason
I support the FOP choice is because of the momentum of development.
> This is more of a personal gut-feeling than proper research.
Geesh, I went to http://xml.apache.org/fop to get an idea of the development cycle and found that the latest release (0.20.5) is dated July 2003. So much for active development. (Yikes!)
FWIW, we (we=some RH Docs folks) did some testing a few months ago on a doc that had the typical level of complexity that approximated our needs: variablelists, nested lists, and a number of tables. FOP produced excellent output with no funky formatting. OTOH, the passivetex output was quite messed up in a variety of ways (most of which escape me at the moment). Hence my recommedation to try FOP.
But if there is a better solution, I'm all ears. My concern is simply to get the print toolchain in working order. Many people (myself included) *do* want to print out a document to read, rather than reading from a screen. Yes, we can print out the HTML, but due to the combo of chunking & formatting, the process is inefficient and can produce low-quality print copy.
Mainly, I think our tool choices should tie into our technical philosophy (open, works, XML) and provide us with a wide pool of knowledgeable users (DocBook, XML, XSL, FOP).
I know this may sound crazy, but if we have to, we can use the DSSSL/jade toolchain as a last-resort fallback. Of course, doing so will put some restrictions on the content of the source files (e.g. no Xincludes), but I don't see this as being a problem, as the markup used in Fedora docs is not likely to be complex.
DaveP: being the resident XSL-FO expert, what fo -> pdf (or even xml -> pdf) tool(s) do you recommend?
Can anyone step up to demonstrate a method to get FOP to compile and run using gcj and gij?
Strictly speaking, we shouldn't need to recompile it under gcj, but it's a nice, safe thing to do if we're going to use gij as the java interpreter.
While on vacation all next week, I'll see if I can get FOP running under gij (I need to do this for an internal project, anyway) and will report back when I return.
*wracks his brain thinking of developers he can bargain with ...*
s/bargain with/bribe/
Cheers, Mark
-- ---------------------------------------------------------- Mark Johnson <mjohnson@xxxxxxxxxx> OS Product Documentation Engineering, Red Hat, Inc. <http://www.redhat.com> Tel: 919.754.4151 Fax: 919.754.3708 GPG fp: DBEA FA3C C46A 70B5 F120 568B 89D5 4F61 C07D E242
