using Forrest styles to generate standalone documents

[Arnaud Sahuguet <ar...@gmail.com>]

Hi,

I am looking at a simple and elegant way to generate memos, how-tos,
etc. I am already using Forrest for some web sites.

But I also want to be able to generate "standalone documents" (HTML or
PDF). I also want people who are not using Forrest to be able to
author such documents and provide them with the xml template and a
command line tool to generate the final document.

For me options are:
- docBook
- aurigaDoc
- Forrest

Since I am already using Forrest and that some of the documents will
ultimately end up in the my Forrest sites, I would rather go with
Forrest.

I have tried to use the Forrest stylesheets with Apache FOP. After
some tweaking (adding in the original document some skinconfig info,
etc.), FOP still complains about "flow must be child of page-sequence,
not fo:block", I cannot find a way to solve the problem.

Here are my 2 questions:
- what is the best way to generate "standalone documents" using Forrest?
- if using FOP, how do I solve the flow problem?

regards,

Arnaud

Re: using Forrest styles to generate standalone documents

[Ross Gardler <rg...@apache.org>]

Arnaud Sahuguet wrote:
> Here are my 2 questions:
> - what is the best way to generate "standalone documents" using Forrest?

- have your users save their documents in a standard location on the 
network that happens to be a Forrest project.

- call forrest from the command line as follows:

forrest site -Dproject.start-uri=myfile.pdf

Your PDF will be generated in build/site (unless you configure it 
oterwise in forrest.properties)

(note: this is the third time this has come up this week, for various 
reasons, this should go into the FAQ - anyone with time to add it and 
submit a patch?)

Ross

Re: using Forrest styles to generate standalone documents

[David Crossley <cr...@apache.org>]

Arnaud Sahuguet wrote:
> 
> Here are my 2 questions:
> - what is the best way to generate "standalone documents" using Forrest?

You could use the skin called "plain-dev" to generate
html docs with no navigation menu panels. Is that
what you mean by "standalone"? If so, then set that
skin name if forrest.properties and then call the
comand-line 'forrest'.

--David