I wouldn't use XSL-FO. I used it a ton years ago and it does not hold
a candle to LaTeX. I don't know if they've made changes to the spec
but when I was using it the worst part was working with XML that
ocassionally had attribute names over 30 characters. Don't get me
wrong - I thought it was great at producing PDF's... until I met
LaTeX.
As for what it sounds like you want to do... I'm guessing that the PDF
will be the product and HTML / Word / whatever is only the means to
manage the data between people before producing the PDF - right? In
that case...
You could use a scripting language to output PDF's and provide an
interface to manage the data. A quick google for 'ruby pdf' has a nice
intro in the second link (
http://www.artima.com/rubycs/articles/pdf_writer.html ) to
PDF::Writer. As much as I dislike Rails (for taking over the mailing
lists), you could whip up a system in Rails that presented a web
front-end to manage the data and that output PDF's either by producing
LaTeX files or through something like PDF::Writer.
I guess it would all depend on the complexity of the document you
wanted to produce... if it were fairly complex you could whittle down
your options...
-Rich
On 10/22/06, Michael Moore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Here's the twist. In addition to PDF output, I want to be able to
> export to a format that others can comfortably edit. Good formats would
> be something like Word or HTML. Ideally, the Word document should look
> as similar as possible to the PDF document.
> Does anyone have any thoughts? I know this sounds like too much to hope
> for, but it's possible that there's some cool way to deal with this.
> Let's here some ideas, both good and bad.
I'm not sure the exact situation you're running the program in, what
type of documents you're making or who's going to be editing them, but
depending on your needs, Apache FOP may be able to do what you're
looking for.
FOP: http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/
I only played with it once trying to do SVG-->PDF conversions, but
what I understand of it is that it takes a specially formatted XML
file and is able to process it to a bunch of other formats. Of
interest would probably be RTF and PDF. MS Word and countless others
support RTF, of course. RTF may not be able to handle complex
formatting though.
Output formats: http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/0.20.5/output.html
If RTF were good engouh, I think Latex does RTF too....but I'm not sure.
Hope that helps somewhat,
--
Michael Moore
-------------------------
Creative photography for any occasion
http://elementsbycaroline.com
Full quality proofs
Online album
--------------------
BYU Unix Users Group
http://uug.byu.edu/
The opinions expressed in this message are the responsibility of their
author. They are not endorsed by BYU, the BYU CS Department or BYU-UUG.
___________________________________________________________________
List Info: http://uug.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
--------------------
BYU Unix Users Group
http://uug.byu.edu/
The opinions expressed in this message are the responsibility of their
author. They are not endorsed by BYU, the BYU CS Department or BYU-UUG.
___________________________________________________________________
List Info: http://uug.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
