On Fri, April 5, 2013 2:09 pm, Gábor Kövesdán wrote: > I plan to apply to this year's Summer of Code and I wanted to share my > idea with you for discussion. I've been using DocBook both for personal > documents (CV, Bachelor and Master Thesis, papers, etc.) and in the > FreeBSD Project. I'm usually satisfied with the output that Apache FOP > creates but I believe the PDF generation should be better supported. The > only usable open source XSL FO renderer is Apache FOP (xmlroff is very > immature and is not actively developed) so we have no alternatives.
Ouch. > Besides, I had problems with it with large documents (it crashes). As a > result, in FreeBSD, we are still using DocBook 4.2/4.5 with DSSSL > stylesheets to render PDF since we are not satisfied with this > situation. The lack of alternatives could mean technology/vendor > lock-in, it does not work with some of our big documents and Java is a > heavy dependency. I've worked with XSL FO and quite like how it works > but when it comes to these factors I feel afraid of basing a serious > project on XSL FO and FOP. Because of the complexity of XSL FO, it is > not easy to write a renderer so this situation will probably not change > in the near future. In turn, there's been LaTeX for a long time and > people use it, they are familiar with and it is very well supported. > Probably noone would think it is a risk basing a documentation project > on LaTeX.But DocBook is more semantic and I like it much more. Also, the > XHTML and EPUB generation of DocBook is of a really high quality. So I'd > like to combine the advantages of DocBook and LaTeX and create > stylesheets that produce LaTeX output that can be used for printable > formats. I think that probably more people thinks like me and having > this functionality would improve DocBook's acceptance in the industry. Have you looked at speedata Publisher (http://speedata.github.com/publisher/), which is open source, works with XML, and has LuaTeX underneath? (I haven't used it myself.) Regards, Tony Graham tgra...@mentea.net Consultant http://www.mentea.net Mentea 13 Kelly's Bay Beach, Skerries, Co. Dublin, Ireland -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- XML, XSL-FO and XSLT consulting, training and programming --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: docbook-apps-unsubscr...@lists.oasis-open.org For additional commands, e-mail: docbook-apps-h...@lists.oasis-open.org
