interested in reading/contributing to books about fop?

[Rizwan Virk <ri...@cambridgedocs.com>]

Hi everyone,

 

As part of a new open-source initiative, I'm looking for both feedback
on and contributors to a potential book about fop.

 

The initiative is to produce either one or two books about certain open
source software products; 

The goal is to do this using an open source model - with individual
chapters contributed by knowledgeable users/developers, and then making
the book available for free online reading (and a printed/bound version
for a fee like any other book).    

 

While there are already books out there on xsl:fo I haven't seen a good
one dedicated to fop.  I was thinking we might do either one or two
books:

 

-"Fop tips and techniques" - this would be similar to the "hacks" books
and/or the "cookbooks" that are out there for various products.  This
might have snippets of fo code to accomplish various tasks that an
application which uses fop might want to do.  I always found myself
searching around for sample code for given tasks when I was using fop
and this might be a good way to encapsulate this knowledge.

 

-"fop: the unofficial user guide" - this would be similar to the ibm
"redbooks" that they have on ibm products - or the "missing manuals"
books that are out there.  Fop is better documented than some of the
open source projects out there, so am wondering whether this would be
useful.

 

I was wondering if you could provide feedback on:

 

a)       Do you think there's a need for one or both of these books?

 

b)       If so, would you be interested in contributing as either an
author, contributor, editor, or technical reviewer?

 

Please send me an email directly in response - riz@alum.mit.edu 

 

 

Thanks!

Riz

 

----------------------------------------------

Rizwan Virk

Chief Technologist, XML Publishing

CambridgeDocs, a division of Document Sciences

www.cambridgedocs.com <http://www.cambridgedocs.com> 

617-821-6394, riz@cambridgedocs.com <ma...@cambridgedocs.com> 

personal: riz@alum.mit.edu <ma...@alum.mit.edu> 

 

 

 


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Re: interested in reading/contributing to books about fop?

[Cameron McCormack <ca...@mcc.id.au>]

Rizwan Virk:
> The initiative is to produce either one or two books about certain open
> source software products; 
> 
> The goal is to do this using an open source model - with individual
> chapters contributed by knowledgeable users/developers, and then making
> the book available for free online reading (and a printed/bound version
> for a fee like any other book).    

Incidentally, I was recently reading the in-development Django book
online (http://www.djangobook.com/), and it has a very cool interface
for people to make comments on the published chapters.  For example
looking at http://www.djangobook.com/en/beta/chapter09/, you can see
there’s a section of the left margin that corresponds to each top-level
block element of the markup.  If you click on it, you can leave a
comment on that paragraph/list/code fragment.

Perhaps you could use a similar interface.

-- 
Cameron McCormack, http://mcc.id.au/
	xmpp:heycam@jabber.org  ▪  ICQ 26955922  ▪  MSN cam@mcc.id.au

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Re: interested in reading/contributing to books about fop?

[Vincent Hennebert <vi...@anyware-tech.com>]

Hi Rizwan,

Rizwan Virk a écrit :
> Hi everyone,
>
> As part of a new open-source initiative, I'm looking for both feedback
> on and contributors to a potential book about fop.
>
> The initiative is to produce either one or two books about certain open
> source software products;
>
> The goal is to do this using an open source model - with individual
> chapters contributed by knowledgeable users/developers, and then making
> the book available for free online reading (and a printed/bound version
> for a fee like any other book).

This is good news and might contribute to creating buzz around FOP.
I like the idea and hope that users who have been successfully using FOP
for some time will be willing to contribute.


> While there are already books out there on xsl:fo I haven't seen
> a good
> one dedicated to fop.  I was thinking we might do either one or two
> books:
>
> -"Fop tips and techniques" - this would be similar to the "hacks" books
> and/or the "cookbooks" that are out there for various products.  This
> might have snippets of fo code to accomplish various tasks that an
> application which uses fop might want to do.  I always found myself
> searching around for sample code for given tasks when I was using fop
> and this might be a good way to encapsulate this knowledge.

This might be a good idea. There are many details of the XSL-FO spec
which are left to the implementation's judgment, and I bet different
implementations will have different behaviours in many cases.
There are some corner situations where FOP behaves a particular way and,
especially combined with the Knuth algorithm, which may be utilized to
achieve special effects. This might be interesting to gather such tricks
in a book.

That said, writing tips about that requires a deep knowledge of the spec
and possibly FOP's code. Moreover, this might get quickly deprecated as
the code is constantly evolving. While I wouldn't have the time to write
such tips myself I would certainly be glad to review others' work.


> -"fop: the unofficial user guide" - this would be similar to the ibm
> "redbooks" that they have on ibm products - or the "missing manuals"
> books that are out there.  Fop is better documented than some of the
> open source projects out there, so am wondering whether this would be
> useful.

Yes, and I would probably prefer to have the website completed if there
is any missing doc.


> I was wondering if you could provide feedback on:
>
> a)       Do you think there's a need for one or both of these books?

The first one might prove to be useful, but would require some
maintenance.


> b)       If so, would you be interested in contributing as either an
> author, contributor, editor, or technical reviewer?

Like I said I would be glad to review any writings about FOP.


Thanks for your proposal,
Vincent

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