On 08/22/2011 11:31 PM, Raphael Hertzog wrote:
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?
Yes we looked at it, 5 years ago, at that time it
1: couldn't cope with the complex documents we tested it on, trying to
build them generated thousands of errors
2: we couldn't get simple documents to work reliably in CJK and Indic
languages
3: it wasn't easy to base a distributable on it for Windows
4: the style wasn't anywhere near as good as the output you get from the
XML::FO generated by the default style sheets
Maybe we could give http://docbookpublishing.com/ a whirl :P
Cheers, Jeff.
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