Glen Mazza wrote: > So the XSL-FO spec--which FOP is trying to implement > for as many output types as possible--is not relevant > for those output types which don't need to know glyph > size? By putting it into a separate tool, that is > what you may be implying.
In a way, that's true. You need control over glyph placement (and, of course, lines, area, etc.) if you want to do a conforming implementation. I don't think you will be able to reach even basic conformance with output types HTML, RTF and MIF - expect perhaps in a very degenerate way (like creating an image for each page). With RTF (but only with a very recent version of it), you might stand a chance to reach at least roughly basic conformance. Conceptually, XSL:FO, RTF, MIF and HTML are the same thing (no nitpicking please 8-)). A renderer implementation of each of these standards produces glyphs, lines, and other low-level graphical objects that have definitive place on a medium. This is structurally some very different from converting between these language conversion. To summarize my view on this: FO->RTF, FO->MIF, FO->HTML is a conversion between similar high-level-languages where each language element has a similar corresponding language element in the destination language. FO->PDF, FO->PostScript, FO->PCL, FO->AWT are formatting processes. The formatting part is what makes up the primary goal and especially most of the complexity of FOP. How about seeing things from this perspective: transformation of XSL:FO to RTF, MIF and HTML could be done using an XSLT stylesheet (provided that you create a trivial XML representation of RTF and MIF first, of course). That stylesheet would be complex, of course, but on the 'possible side', because these transformations fundamentally are tree transformations of the same kinds of things. What can be shared between conversion and formatting beside the things I already mentioned? I think you can forget almost everything about fonts, the layouters, the area tree. How does this sound to you? -- Cappelino Informationstechnologie GmbH Arnd Beißner --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
