Elliotte Rusty Harold writes:
> that end, I've been putting the various XSL-FO engines on the market
> through their paces.
interesting, thanks for that
> PassiveTeX
...
> quirky instance where the first bullet point in a list was not indented
> quite right, but this didn't seem to occur in other bulleted lists.
its an interaction with running heads, I think
> The downside to PassiveTeX is that it depends on a "decent modern TeX
> setup"; and TeX is invariably a nightmare.
heresy! TeX is a very very simple program to set up. far far easier
than anything involving Python, Perl and Java (in descending order of
horror). and it never segfaults
> consider myself lucky to have been able to get PassiveTeX running; and
> it still fails one time out of every two. This is probably due to TeX's
> unusual multipass architecture.
unusual? "simplistic", perhaps.
> You sometimes have to run TeX a second
> time to get the links and cross-references right. In my case, the first
> pass succeeds but the second pass invariably fails. Thus I never get
> proper cross-references to page numbers in the table of contents and
> elsewhere.
I'd much appreciate a test file showing the problem, please. I do not
have this problem (having just finished a conference proceeedings
using FO and PassiveTeX, I am prety confident)
(antenna house)
> The downside to this otherwise excellent engine is that it's Windows
> only and based on Windows graphics primitives rather than PostScript or
> PDF. It displays on the screen very nicely, and prints nicely too.
> However, it does not produce a PDF document that I can send to my editor
> or a typesetter.
Cant you print PS to file and Distill it?
> finished product. Ņone of them can replace TeX or QuarkXPress. You might
> be able to publish a simple book with these, but you'd have to design
> your book and style sheet so that you avoided the bugs and unimplemented
> features of the processor.
how true...
Sebastina
