XSL fo creation tools?

[Kelly Campbell <ca...@channelpoint.com>]

Does anyone know of any XSL WYSIWYG creation tool projects in the works? I'm
not sure this is really even possible with XSL given its programatic nature.
Eventually it would be nice to see something like QuarkXPress for XSL:fo
though.

Thanks,
Kelly
--
Kelly A. Campbell                       Commerce Core Engineer
<ke...@channelpoint.com>       ChannelPoint, Inc.
<ca...@pcisys.net> <ca...@acm.org>        Colorado Springs, Co.
Voice: 719-867-9324                     AIM: chptcamk

Re: XSL fo creation tools?

[Stephan Albers <St...@af-software.de>]

Kelly Campbell schrieb:
> Does anyone know of any XSL WYSIWYG creation tool projects in the works? I'm
> not sure this is really even possible with XSL given its programatic nature.

There are some, but I am quite unsure about their quality. Typically
they have patterns (XPath) and actions in different windows. In the long
term I'd like to have something that has more WYSIWYG features, but that
seems to be tough.

check XMLSoftware (managed by James!) http://www.xmlsoftware.com/xsl

IBM has two tools on alphaworks: XSL Editor and Visual XML Tools, 
http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com

Stylus, http://www.transformis.com


> Eventually it would be nice to see something like QuarkXPress for XSL:fo
> though.

This is a more complex issue. We have worked on this. More in another
mail.

Stephan

Re: XSL fo creation tools?

[James Tauber <jt...@jtauber.com>]

> Does anyone know of any XSL WYSIWYG creation tool projects in the works?

Sharon Adler (XSL-WG co-chair) demoed one at WWW8 in Toronto earlier this
year (where I also demoed FOP for the first time). She was working for INSO
at the time but I don't know if INSO had plans to turn it into a product.
Sharon now works for IBM Research.

Although I haven't used it, Excelon Stylus looks really cool. It does
interactive creation of XSLT showing output if the output vocabulary is
HTML. We could do the same for XSL-FOs.

James

Re: XSL fo creation tools?

[Stephan Albers <St...@af-software.de>]

Arved Sandstrom schrieb:
> > Eventually it would be nice to see something like QuarkXPress for XSL:fo
> > though.
> >
> I think it would work, actually. Assuming the editor had access to a DTD,
> you could layout each result element in a fairly abstract way - Page, Area
> Containers, Areas, lists, tables, etc etc, and specify what source
> elements provide that chunk of the flow, and the editor would produce the
> relevant templates.

We have done this for a much simpler formatting model and it is very
hard work especially if you want some WYSIWYG capabilities. More about
this in my QuarkXPress mail.


> In a sense Stefan Albers' AWT Previewer could even be the nucleus for this
> kind of thing, if you worked in the other direction.

I don't think so. AWT Preview is just a mapping between elements of the
layout tree (which are very low level) and some AWT calls via the
renderer interface. James did the most stuff when defining the renderer
interface.

Stephan

Re: XSL fo creation tools?

[Arved Sandstrom <Ar...@chebucto.ns.ca>]

On Wed, 1 Dec 1999, Kelly Campbell wrote:

> Does anyone know of any XSL WYSIWYG creation tool projects in the works? I'm
> not sure this is really even possible with XSL given its programatic nature.
> Eventually it would be nice to see something like QuarkXPress for XSL:fo
> though.
> 
I think it would work, actually. Assuming the editor had access to a DTD,
you could layout each result element in a fairly abstract way - Page, Area
Containers, Areas, lists, tables, etc etc, and specify what source
elements provide that chunk of the flow, and the editor would produce the
relevant templates.

In a sense Stefan Albers' AWT Previewer could even be the nucleus for this
kind of thing, if you worked in the other direction.

Arved