Clay Leeds wrote:Be warned that the RenderX testsuite files require a relatively high degree of spec compliance. Shorthands are used everywhere, all table
examples require auto-layout, and so on. I confess that I learned a
few more things about FO when testing with these files...
Sounds like a good exercise for someone like me, to transform those shorthand items into 'longhand'...
Shorthands have been fully handled in alt-design's properties for about 18 months now.
Glad to hear it! One of these days, I'll have to build alt.design from source so I can see all of your hard work. I notice that it uses a non-ant system of building, so I may get back to you on how steps to proceed with the build (unless the steps are outlined and/or linked from the site :-)).
That's true. So let's all get back to work. 8-)
From Peter's mail:
The thing that immediately strikes me about Arnd's development is that it seems to blow away the theory that incremental modification of an existing code base is always the better way to go. IIUC, Arnd wrote a formatter from scratch (except for some fo the font handling) in two years.
I don't think what I did proves your point. Even though it worked for me this time, it was a high risk (ok, since I was always prepared to treat this a fun project, no risk). It was really a gamble, one I wouldn't have done under other circumstances - for example not if producing an FO formatter had been our business then. I suppose when you look around, you will find much, much more failed "rewrite" projects than failed "incremental" projects. In any case, I really don't think you can compare a one-person effort to that of a distributed group. Also, I believe this is rather a generic software-development question. If you think you do see the light at the end of the tunnel for the FOP rewrite then by all means go for it.
That's interesting. My view on alt.design has pretty much always been one talented guy working on the other side of the world, and coding FOP the way he always wanted to. No distractions or lengthy discussion (albeit frequently contributing insightful posts to FOP-Dev &-user). I haven't been keeping tabs on the status of alt-design lately so I don't 'know' where it is at present (I'll check the status page directly).
That won't do you much good, as I haven't updates the docs for some time now. I'm currently working on layout, using Java's facilities (including 1.3 and 1.4) for the layout engine. I'll update the pages as I make progress on this.
Heh! I noticed that... I was actually going to ask if you had any updates I could apply, but then...
Btw, I'm now in the dark about the way the web pages are being maintained. It's been a while since I was involved in the discussions about Forrest and FOP, primarily around using Javascript in pages. I'll read the docs docs again.
Peter
No problem. I think this is something *I* can handle... ;-) I recently spent some time figuring out Forrest. I haven't completed all of my travels, however, as I still get errors when I do a forrest run. However, I do understand the format itself pretty well, so if you can give me 'before' and after (or a diff would be fine, I can commit the necessary changes--committership has its privileges... don't worry, I won't touch JAVA code 'til I've spent some time hashing things through!)
Otherwise, you could always just edit the XML source files the way you like. That should work just as well. Once the edits have been committed, running forrestbot should do the rest (of course we'll have to replace breadcrumb.js--D'oh!--as I think it still gets clobbered when forrestbot runs).
Web Maestro Clay
