pdf toolchain notes & suggestions

[Mark Johnson]

Karsten Wade wrote:
> On Thu, 2004-09-23 at 12:12, Mark Johnson wrote:
> 
> Obviously there are going to be many ways to approach this.  One reason
> I support the FOP choice is because of the momentum of development. 
 > This is more of a personal gut-feeling than proper research.

Geesh, I went to http://xml.apache.org/fop to get an idea of the 
development cycle and found that the latest release (0.20.5) is 
dated July 2003. So much for active development. (Yikes!)

FWIW, we (we=some RH Docs folks) did some testing a few months ago 
on a doc that had the typical level of complexity that approximated 
our needs: variablelists, nested lists, and a number of tables. FOP 
produced excellent output with no funky formatting. OTOH, the 
passivetex output was quite messed up in a variety of ways (most of 
which escape me at the moment). Hence my recommedation to try FOP.

But if there is a better solution, I'm all ears. My concern is 
simply to get the print toolchain in working order. Many people 
(myself included) *do* want to print out a document to read, rather 
than reading from a screen. Yes, we can print out the HTML, but due 
to the combo of chunking & formatting, the process is inefficient 
and can produce low-quality print copy.
> 
> Mainly, I think our tool choices should tie into our technical
> philosophy (open, works, XML) and provide us with a wide pool of
> knowledgeable users (DocBook, XML, XSL, FOP).

I know this may sound crazy, but if we have to, we can use the 
DSSSL/jade toolchain as a last-resort fallback. Of course, doing so 
will put some restrictions on the content of the source files (e.g. 
no Xincludes), but I don't see this as being a problem, as the 
markup used in Fedora docs is not likely to be complex.

DaveP: being the resident XSL-FO expert, what fo -> pdf (or even xml 
-> pdf) tool(s) do you recommend?

> Can anyone step up to demonstrate a method to get FOP to compile and run
> using gcj and gij?

Strictly speaking, we shouldn't need to recompile it under gcj, but 
it's a nice, safe thing to do if we're going to use gij as the java 
interpreter.

While on vacation all next week, I'll see if I can get FOP running 
under gij (I need to do this for an internal project, anyway) and 
will report back when I return.

> 
> *wracks his brain thinking of developers he can bargain with ...*

s/bargain with/bribe/

Cheers,
Mark

-- 
----------------------------------------------------------
Mark Johnson                     <mjohnson at redhat.com>
OS Product Documentation
Engineering, Red Hat, Inc.       <http://www.redhat.com>
Tel: 919.754.4151                Fax: 919.754.3708
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