Hi, On Mon, 22 Aug 2011, Jeff Fearn wrote: > It's not nearly as annoying as the limitations FOP has, such as no > complex text PDFs, and the fact that the current release is > basically un-packagable.
Hum, Debian still has 0.95 (and not 1.0). I don't know the reasons but at least it gives some plausibility to your statement. :-) > >The PDF should be a high quality rendering so that the result is perfect > >should it be printed as a real book (via a print-on-demand service for > >example). > > This was the original goal of the PDF, it was not attainable, and it > is not what PDF consumers use it for. The PDF is now aimed at being > a single file distributable, which closely resembles the other > outputs. BTW epub is also a "single-file distributable" (even if it's a just a zip file). > Perhaps sometime in the future we will consider another output for > this use case. I would definitely love this. > The reason we are switching is because FOP is unmaintainable, if you > want to step up and maintain FOP then I'm happy to stick with it. > Unless someone steps up and maintains FOP we will be looking to > switch, even if we lose some functionality. I don't think I'm going to step up to maintain the FOP backend but I'm definitely interested in a PDF that is of book print-quality and if the switch picks a new technology where this is possible I _might_ contribute a bit (or pay someone to contribute). > >Most of the people doing docbook use some sort of LaTeX based backend for > >the PDF generation. And it's also what many people expect when it comes to > >create a real book. > > I've never seen any even remotely decent docbook->latex tools, feel > free to drop some names and some links if you know of any. According to my limited experience, dblatex seems to be the most popular XSLT stylesheets: http://dblatex.sourceforge.net/ Did you consider it? If yes, what were the main problems? > At the time the Latex options sucked horribly for CJK, and Indic was > impossible with CJK support. FOP gave us the hope of having a single > tool that could handle all the languages required, a false hope as > it turned out :( I don't know anything about dblatex's support of those languages. It's not something that mattered for my use cases. > If it's much less featured, but sucks much less time, then that's a > fair trade AFAIAC. Well, it if doesn't add much over taking the HTML single page and doing "print to PDF", I don't really see the point of it. > >Are those changes things that are upstreamable in QT/Webkit? > > Apparently getting changes up-streamed is difficult in that community. :-( Cheers, -- Raphaël Hertzog ◈ Debian Developer Follow my Debian News ▶ http://RaphaelHertzog.com (English) ▶ http://RaphaelHertzog.fr (Français) _______________________________________________ publican-list mailing list [email protected] https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/publican-list Wiki: https://fedorahosted.org/publican
