Avox: > FO, used for lowlevel text layout Timo Stollenwerk: > Do you mean the transformation SLA->FO? > I don't think this is possible because you can do much > more in Scribus than in FO.
I'm not quite sure if that is true. The XSL specifications do include lots of features that are not available either in Scribus nor in InDesign, Quark, etc. <fo:initial-property-set font-variant="small-caps"/>, for example, allows the stylesheet designer to have the FO processor to typeset the first line of a paragraph in small caps. (Future versions would even allow to define a line depth.) This might be done in InDesign with nested styles if it were not for the fact that a soft line-break is not available as a marker. With Xpath functions (build into XSL) the user can program even more intelligent conditional behaviour, such as switching between font-style="regular" and font-style="italic" for strings tagged with <em/> if the surrounding paragraph would be styled in italic and regular respectively. XSL-FO is but a style definition format, not in the least responsible for the quality of the typesetting or lay-out. And in this respect it's doing quite a good job, that is, as an inventory of feasible layout and formatting patterns. It is the processor (typesetting engine if you will), its line and page-breaking algorithms, hyphenation routines, and, of course, its support of XSL-FO, that are responsible for the typographical output quality. Sure, extra features or formatting objects could be defined in addition to the XSL specs. These may be submitted to the specification owners who might include them into future versions. Nothing prevents developers, however, from devising of and implementing support for such additional features into their apps. In this respect I suggested that if such features were to exist in Scribus (e.g. non-rectangular text frames), they could be defined in a FO compliant vocabulary and added to Scribus's own expanded version of XSL-FO. The only thing that's needed to process FO satisfactory, is of course a good Formatting Objects Processor. Apache FOP is one to start with, while TeX is being transformed into yet a better one, taking advantage of TeX's superior typesetting capabilities. Such and such a FO engine, build-in as a back-end processor for Scribus, would yield very high level text layout and typography. *** Ludwig: >> The more difficult part is of course to display >> the FOP output within the Scribus GUI environment, so >> that the user could refine the automated output manually. Timo Stollenwerk: > This would require a XSLT Stylesheet >> FO->SLA. Either that, or have Scribus to display .fo natively, i.e. on-the-fly as a WYSIWYG editor. .sla is structured as xml: would it be possible, to some extent, to convert .fo to .sla using xsl transformations? I know this could be done with the Adobe InDesign Interchange format (.inx), which is xml. *** Michael Koren: > For my diploma thesis I've read some > scientific papers about adaptive layout techniques > (if you are interested, I can send them to you). Could you send them to me too? scribus AT rhythmus .be Thanks in advance! Ludwig
