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Posted to fop-dev@xmlgraphics.apache.org by Elliotte Rusty Harold <el...@metalab.unc.edu> on 2000/09/30 16:58:20 UTC
XSL Formatting Objects Chapter Updated
I'm happy to announce that I've posted a completely updated version
of Chapter 15 of the XML Bible, XSL Formatting Objects, at Cafe con
Leche:
http://www.ibiblio.org/xml/books/bible/updates/15.html
This is the complete chapter, approximately 70 pages with many full examples
of XSL-FO. Everything should be up-to-date with the March 27, 2000
Last Call working draft of the XSL-FO specification and FOP 0.14.0.
To the best of my knowledge, this is the only comprehensive tutorial
covering the current version of XSL-FO.
Doubtless there are some errors since I was breaking new ground here
and had to work from an incomplete and sometimes contradictory spec
document, as well as using unfinished pre-alpha software. Since this
is more-or-less what's going to go into the second edition of the XML
Bible, as well as likely being the primary source for many new users
learning XSL-FO, I'd very much appreciate it if you can inform me of
any mistakes you spot so I can fix them.
--
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| The XML Bible (IDG Books, 1999) |
| http://metalab.unc.edu/xml/books/bible/ |
| http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0764532367/cafeaulaitA/ |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
| Read Cafe au Lait for Java News: http://metalab.unc.edu/javafaq/ |
| Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://metalab.unc.edu/xml/ |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
Re: XSL-FO Engine comparisons
Posted by Arved Sandstrom <Ar...@chebucto.ns.ca>.
At 09:24 AM 7/31/01 -0400, Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote:
[SNIP]
>So far, I've experimented with four different XSL-FO processors: the
>Apache XML Project's FOP, Sebastian Rahtz's PassiveTeX, the Antenna
>House XSL Formatter 1.1E, and RenderX's XEP. Two are implemented in
>Java, one in native Windows code, and one in TeX. FOP and PassiveTeX are
>open source. Antenna House and XEP are payware. Here are my experiences
>with each:
>
>FOP
>
>FOP was the first XSL-FO engine and is certainly the most popular. It's
>open source and far easier to install than PassiveTeX, the other open
>source alternative. However, of the ones I was able to actually test it
>produced by far the worst output. It had the most annoying formatting
>troubles. For example, it ate all the blank lines in my source code
>examples and put extra indentation at the front of the first line of
>each example. I've noticed that probably more than half of the bug
>reports on the Docbook-APPS mailing list about the Docbook XSL-FO
>stylesheets can actually be attributed to bugs in FOP. FOP is improving
>rapidly -- one major bug I noted in footnote handling was fixed in the
>last couple of weeks while I was performing my tests -- but it's clearly
>not even an alpha quality release yet. A lot of work needs to be done
>before FOP can be recommended for more than experimentation.
[SNIP]
No arguments from me, in the main. You've basically established that there
is a reasonably strong correlation between effort expended and progress. :-)
The 2 commercial efforts probably put in more person-hours per day than FOP
gets in a week, and of course PassiveTeX gets even less attention than FOP.
FOP developers and committers have never suggested that the processor is
anything other than a work in progress. My best guess is that if we have a
production release by the end of the year then we'll be doing well. Alpha is
a long ways away.
My experience with DocBook FO stylesheets and all of the formatters suggest
that even though your statement about bugs on the Docbook-APPS mailing list
is most likely true, that there are sizeable chunks of DocBook FO that do
not layout properly in _any_ formatter. Statistically, if the huge majority
of people that process DocBook FO are using FOP, then it stands to reason
that they are turning up lots of bugs and that almost all are from FOP. Says
very little about FOP relative to other processors. And how many _unique_
defects are being reported?
But you're right - nobody should be using the processor in production. Not
yet. When we think it's ready we'll say so.
>Bottom line: none of the formatters are yet suitable for producing a
>finished product. Ñone of them can replace TeX or QuarkXPress. You might
>be able to publish a simple book with these, but you'd have to design
>your book and style sheet so that you avoided the bugs and unimplemented
>features of the processor. Antenna House probably produces the most
>polished output, and I'd use it if all I wanted to do was print out a
>document from my laser printer. However, since I need PDF files I can
>send to my editors and download to a typesetter, my choice for the time
>being is PassiveTeX.
Antenna House is good, but as you say it's Windows only...serious drawback.
RenderX XEP, IMHO, is the best all-round FO processor available right now. I
certainly have had no problems in using it, either.
Useful review, in any case. If you happen to post it elsewhere, do us a
favour - specifically note that we (FOP) do not recommend FOP for general
production, that it is under development, and that it's not even close to
alpha. All points you made yourself. Thanks.
Regards,
Arved Sandstrom
Fairly Senior Software Type
e-plicity (http://www.e-plicity.com)
Wireless * B2B * J2EE * XML --- Halifax, Nova Scotia
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Re: XSL-FO Engine comparisons
Posted by Steven Lane <sl...@mail.fmpro.com>.
>I've been spending a lot of time lately with Docbook and XSL-FO as part
>of the ongoing development of my next book, Processing XML with Java. To
>that end, I've been putting the various XSL-FO engines on the market
>through their paces. I'm trying to find one that will actually let me
>produce the complete, finished book from my Docbook source code and Norm
>Walsh's XSLT-to-XSL-FO stylesheet. I thought I'd share my experiences
>here.
It's not FO-based, but I've been experimenting with ReportMill, which was
originally for use with WebObjects but is not (more or less) accessible via
Java. It looks pretty promising but I don't think it's geared toward long
structured documents.
----------
Steve Lane
Vice President
Chris Moyer Consulting, Inc.
833 West Chicago Ave Suite 203
(312) 433-2421
http://www.fmpro.com
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Re: XSL Formatting Objects Chapter Updated
Posted by Elliotte Rusty Harold <el...@metalab.unc.edu>.
At 9:09 PM +0100 10/1/00, Sebastian Rahtz wrote:
>Elliotte Rusty Harold writes:
> > I'm happy to announce that I've posted a completely updated version
> > of Chapter 15 of the XML Bible, XSL Formatting Objects, at Cafe con
> > Leche:
> >
> > http://www.ibiblio.org/xml/books/bible/updates/15.html
>
>Very interesting, thanks.
>
>I haven't yet read through it all, but I note that at the start you
>say there are 51 elements. This is wrong, there are 56 by my
>reckoning. You have missed out, for instance, fo:marker and
>fo:retrieve-marker, and you mention fo:instream-graphic, which has
>gone. I'd guess this table isn't updated since the earlier version of
>the book.
>
That's a mistake alright. I'll fix it. Thanks! The table was updated
but the problem seems to be that it was updated from the January 12
draft rather than the March 27 draft. This is why writers need
editors.
--
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| The XML Bible (IDG Books, 1999) |
| http://metalab.unc.edu/xml/books/bible/ |
| http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0764532367/cafeaulaitA/ |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
| Read Cafe au Lait for Java News: http://metalab.unc.edu/javafaq/ |
| Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://metalab.unc.edu/xml/ |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
Re: XSL Formatting Objects Chapter Updated
Posted by Sebastian Rahtz <se...@computing-services.oxford.ac.uk>.
Elliotte Rusty Harold writes:
> I'm happy to announce that I've posted a completely updated version
> of Chapter 15 of the XML Bible, XSL Formatting Objects, at Cafe con
> Leche:
>
> http://www.ibiblio.org/xml/books/bible/updates/15.html
Very interesting, thanks.
I haven't yet read through it all, but I note that at the start you
say there are 51 elements. This is wrong, there are 56 by my
reckoning. You have missed out, for instance, fo:marker and
fo:retrieve-marker, and you mention fo:instream-graphic, which has
gone. I'd guess this table isn't updated since the earlier version of
the book.
Sebastian Rahtz
Re: XSL-FO Engine comparisons
Posted by Elliotte Rusty Harold <el...@metalab.unc.edu>.
At 7:19 PM +0200 7/31/01, Petr Andrs wrote:
>I think there is other reason for formatters beeing not production redy
>as well. This reason is that XSL FO is only in CR state of its first
>version. I think 1.1 or 2.0 XSL FO Recomendation will be far better.
>
I don't think that's it. I haven't found any cases where XSL FO was insufficiently expressive for my needs (essentially laying out a computer book). There've been a couple of cases where Docbook was insufficiently expressive, but there are workarounds for that. The problems I encountered were all in implementation, not in the language. A new version of XSLFO wouldn't really help me any.
--
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| The XML Bible, 2nd Edition (Hungry Minds, 2001) |
| http://www.ibiblio.org/xml/books/bible2/ |
| http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0764547607/cafeaulaitA/ |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
| Read Cafe au Lait for Java News: http://www.cafeaulait.org/ |
| Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://www.ibiblio.org/xml/ |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
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Re: XSL-FO Engine comparisons
Posted by Petr Andrs <pa...@artax.karlin.mff.cuni.cz>.
Hi,
I am now working on reporting tool which outputs reports into XSL FO,
so I have some experinece with tools described here. Althoug we are
using only quite simple formatting I would like to say something to
this topic as well.
On 31 Jul 2001, at 9:24 Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote about XSL-FO Engine comparisons :
> FOP
>
> FOP was the first XSL-FO engine and is certainly the most popular. It's
> open source and far easier to install than PassiveTeX, the other open
> source alternative. However, of the ones I was able to actually test it
> produced by far the worst output. It had the most annoying formatting
> troubles. For example, it ate all the blank lines in my source code
I have to agree that FOP is worst I have used, but is improving
rapidly. In version 0.17, which was recent in the time I started to
follow developement it was practicaly unusable due to lack of
international support. Now I am quite satisfied, in basics FOP
fullfills our needs although some workarounds are still needed.
> examples and put extra indentation at the front of the first line of
> each example. I've noticed that probably more than half of the bug
> reports on the Docbook-APPS mailing list about the Docbook XSL-FO
> stylesheets can actually be attributed to bugs in FOP. FOP is improving
> rapidly -- one major bug I noted in footnote handling was fixed in the
> last couple of weeks while I was performing my tests -- but it's clearly
> not even an alpha quality release yet. A lot of work needs to be done
> before FOP can be recommended for more than experimentation.
>
> XEP
>
> I was unable to get XEP to run. It was totally non-functional, and did
> not produce any output. I know some other people have gotten it to run
> -- the PDF version of the XSL specification was produced with XEP.
> However, it simply did not work for me at all. However good the XEP
> engine may be at converting XSL-FO documents to PDF, its horrible user
> interface and incomprehensible installation procedure eliminated it from
> my consideration.
I am using evaluation version of XEP with success. It is far better
than FOP. It has strange behavior on repeating table headers and it
doesn't support collapsing border model on tables. Instalation i quite
easy, version 2.50 has even installer which configures BAT file for
you. There is one issue - JAXP MUST NOT be installed as JAVA extension -
In that case XEP fails with Class not found exception.
> PassiveTeX
As I had some experience with TeX that suggested that TeX is I
nightmare I even didn't try It. :-))
> Antenna House XSL Formatter
>
> The Antenna House XSL Formatter produced very attractive output, on a
> par with that generated by PassiveTeX and much better than FOP's. I
> noticed no major flaws or cosmetic bugs. Antenna House also claims
> they're the only formatter able to handle mixed writing-modes such as
> "tb-rl" for Chinese/Japanese/Korean, though I didn't test that.
I have to agree that Antenna is best I have seen
> Most importantly, Antenna House had by far the easiest installation and
> the nicest user interface of all the formatters tested. More work is
> still needed, but at least I could conceive of giving this formatter to
> a non-programmer end-user. The others all have effectively non-existent
> user interfaces, and horrible installation procedures. The Antenna house
I think that lack of user interface is not bug but feature, FOP and XEP
are renderers intended for usage in application servers and servlets.
Software that will provide environment for creating and rendering FO
documnets via services like FOP and XEP must be created. Problems with
instalation and similar things are common feature of really portable
and OS independent Java software.
> formatter was the only one of the four that took me less than an hour
> from download to first use.
>
> The downside to this otherwise excellent engine is that it's Windows
> only and based on Windows graphics primitives rather than PostScript or
> PDF. It displays on the screen very nicely, and prints nicely too.
> However, it does not produce a PDF document that I can send to my editor
> or a typesetter.
>
> Bottom line: none of the formatters are yet suitable for producing a
> finished product. Ňone of them can replace TeX or QuarkXPress. You might
I think there is other reason for formatters beeing not production redy
as well. This reason is that XSL FO is only in CR state of its first
version. I think 1.1 or 2.0 XSL FO Recomendation will be far better.
> be able to publish a simple book with these, but you'd have to design
> your book and style sheet so that you avoided the bugs and unimplemented
> features of the processor. Antenna House probably produces the most
> polished output, and I'd use it if all I wanted to do was print out a
> document from my laser printer. However, since I need PDF files I can
> send to my editors and download to a typesetter, my choice for the time
> being is PassiveTeX. --
>
pa
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Re: XSL-FO Engine comparisons
Posted by Sebastian Rahtz <se...@computing-services.oxford.ac.uk>.
Peter B. West writes:
>
> Sebastian Rahtz wrote:
> > Sebastina
> Your better half?
all my halves are equally good
sebastian
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Re: XSL-FO Engine comparisons
Posted by "Peter B. West" <pb...@powerup.com.au>.
Sebastian Rahtz wrote:
> Elliotte Rusty Harold writes:
.....
> Sebastina
Your better half?
Peter
--
Peter B. West pbwest@powerup.com.au http://powerup.com.au/~pbwest
"Lord, to whom shall we go?"
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Re: XSL-FO Engine comparisons
Posted by Elliotte Rusty Harold <el...@metalab.unc.edu>.
At 10:28 PM +0100 7/31/01, Sebastian Rahtz wrote:
>Elliotte Rusty Harold writes:
> > The downside to this otherwise excellent engine is that it's Windows
> > only and based on Windows graphics primitives rather than PostScript or
> > PDF. It displays on the screen very nicely, and prints nicely too.
> > However, it does not produce a PDF document that I can send to my editor
> > or a typesetter.
>Cant you print PS to file and Distill it?
>
I suppose I could, but only if somebody knows of an open source tool for distilling files. After the Skylarov fiasco, I'll be damned if I'm going to give Adobe one more penny.
Hmm, after a little hunting around with Google it looks like GhostScript might actually do that. I'll have to give it a try.
--
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| The XML Bible, 2nd Edition (Hungry Minds, 2001) |
| http://www.ibiblio.org/xml/books/bible2/ |
| http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0764547607/cafeaulaitA/ |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
| Read Cafe au Lait for Java News: http://www.cafeaulait.org/ |
| Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://www.ibiblio.org/xml/ |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
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Re: XSL-FO Engine comparisons
Posted by Sebastian Rahtz <se...@computing-services.oxford.ac.uk>.
Elliotte Rusty Harold writes:
> that end, I've been putting the various XSL-FO engines on the market
> through their paces.
interesting, thanks for that
> PassiveTeX
...
> quirky instance where the first bullet point in a list was not indented
> quite right, but this didn't seem to occur in other bulleted lists.
its an interaction with running heads, I think
> The downside to PassiveTeX is that it depends on a "decent modern TeX
> setup"; and TeX is invariably a nightmare.
heresy! TeX is a very very simple program to set up. far far easier
than anything involving Python, Perl and Java (in descending order of
horror). and it never segfaults
> consider myself lucky to have been able to get PassiveTeX running; and
> it still fails one time out of every two. This is probably due to TeX's
> unusual multipass architecture.
unusual? "simplistic", perhaps.
> You sometimes have to run TeX a second
> time to get the links and cross-references right. In my case, the first
> pass succeeds but the second pass invariably fails. Thus I never get
> proper cross-references to page numbers in the table of contents and
> elsewhere.
I'd much appreciate a test file showing the problem, please. I do not
have this problem (having just finished a conference proceeedings
using FO and PassiveTeX, I am prety confident)
(antenna house)
> The downside to this otherwise excellent engine is that it's Windows
> only and based on Windows graphics primitives rather than PostScript or
> PDF. It displays on the screen very nicely, and prints nicely too.
> However, it does not produce a PDF document that I can send to my editor
> or a typesetter.
Cant you print PS to file and Distill it?
> finished product. Ñone of them can replace TeX or QuarkXPress. You might
> be able to publish a simple book with these, but you'd have to design
> your book and style sheet so that you avoided the bugs and unimplemented
> features of the processor.
how true...
Sebastina
Re: XSL-FO Engine comparisons
Posted by Nikolai Grigoriev <gr...@renderx.com>.
Elliotte,
> However, it simply did not work for me at all. However good the XEP
> engine may be at converting XSL-FO documents to PDF, its horrible user
> interface and incomprehensible installation procedure eliminated it from
> my consideration.
Installation package of XEP 2.5 evaluation version consists of two
files: readme.txt and Setup.class. You run Setup.class and follow
the prompts; I wonder if this is not intuitive. (A further step would be
using InstallShield; but this is hard to achieve for a Java application :-)).
Anyhow, in case of installation problems, you can direct your questions
to RenderX support (support@renderx.com).
I realize that our poor command-line utility is far from being a model
of user-friendliness. There are reasons for this: XEP is sold exclusively
for server applications, and we care more about efficiency than about
ease of use. Still there are many downloads from our site, and we get
enough feedback from people who manage to get our tool running. This
makes me think it's not really impossible. If you ever decide to retry
XEP, I would be glad to assist you.
> Bottom line: none of the formatters are yet suitable for producing
> a finished product.
I dare not say that XEP is good enough to suit your needs :-). But (IMVHO)
it's difficult to make statements about maturity level of an application
if you have never run it.
Best regards,
Nikolai Grigoriev
RenderX
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XSL-FO Engine comparisons
Posted by Elliotte Rusty Harold <el...@metalab.unc.edu>.
I've been spending a lot of time lately with Docbook and XSL-FO as part
of the ongoing development of my next book, Processing XML with Java. To
that end, I've been putting the various XSL-FO engines on the market
through their paces. I'm trying to find one that will actually let me
produce the complete, finished book from my Docbook source code and Norm
Walsh's XSLT-to-XSL-FO stylesheet. I thought I'd share my experiences
here.
So far, I've experimented with four different XSL-FO processors: the
Apache XML Project's FOP, Sebastian Rahtz's PassiveTeX, the Antenna
House XSL Formatter 1.1E, and RenderX's XEP. Two are implemented in
Java, one in native Windows code, and one in TeX. FOP and PassiveTeX are
open source. Antenna House and XEP are payware. Here are my experiences
with each:
FOP
FOP was the first XSL-FO engine and is certainly the most popular. It's
open source and far easier to install than PassiveTeX, the other open
source alternative. However, of the ones I was able to actually test it
produced by far the worst output. It had the most annoying formatting
troubles. For example, it ate all the blank lines in my source code
examples and put extra indentation at the front of the first line of
each example. I've noticed that probably more than half of the bug
reports on the Docbook-APPS mailing list about the Docbook XSL-FO
stylesheets can actually be attributed to bugs in FOP. FOP is improving
rapidly -- one major bug I noted in footnote handling was fixed in the
last couple of weeks while I was performing my tests -- but it's clearly
not even an alpha quality release yet. A lot of work needs to be done
before FOP can be recommended for more than experimentation.
XEP
I was unable to get XEP to run. It was totally non-functional, and did
not produce any output. I know some other people have gotten it to run
-- the PDF version of the XSL specification was produced with XEP.
However, it simply did not work for me at all. However good the XEP
engine may be at converting XSL-FO documents to PDF, its horrible user
interface and incomprehensible installation procedure eliminated it from
my consideration.
PassiveTeX
PassiveTex did a very good job formatting most of my document. There
were a few issues involving improperly scaled images, but those were
easily fixed by adding some width attributes to my source XML document.
Once that was done, the only major bug was a failure to properly
calculate page numbers in the table of contents. There was also one
quirky instance where the first bullet point in a list was not indented
quite right, but this didn't seem to occur in other bulleted lists.
The downside to PassiveTeX is that it depends on a "decent modern TeX
setup"; and TeX is invariably a nightmare. If my Linux distribution
hadn't included TeX by default, I would have been lost. As it is, I
consider myself lucky to have been able to get PassiveTeX running; and
it still fails one time out of every two. This is probably due to TeX's
unusual multipass architecture. You sometimes have to run TeX a second
time to get the links and cross-references right. In my case, the first
pass succeeds but the second pass invariably fails. Thus I never get
proper cross-references to page numbers in the table of contents and
elsewhere. Otherwise, the output produced is quite attractive
Antenna House XSL Formatter
The Antenna House XSL Formatter produced very attractive output, on a
par with that generated by PassiveTeX and much better than FOP's. I
noticed no major flaws or cosmetic bugs. Antenna House also claims
they're the only formatter able to handle mixed writing-modes such as
"tb-rl" for Chinese/Japanese/Korean, though I didn't test that.
Most importantly, Antenna House had by far the easiest installation and
the nicest user interface of all the formatters tested. More work is
still needed, but at least I could conceive of giving this formatter to
a non-programmer end-user. The others all have effectively non-existent
user interfaces, and horrible installation procedures. The Antenna house
formatter was the only one of the four that took me less than an hour
from download to first use.
The downside to this otherwise excellent engine is that it's Windows
only and based on Windows graphics primitives rather than PostScript or
PDF. It displays on the screen very nicely, and prints nicely too.
However, it does not produce a PDF document that I can send to my editor
or a typesetter.
Bottom line: none of the formatters are yet suitable for producing a
finished product. Ñone of them can replace TeX or QuarkXPress. You might
be able to publish a simple book with these, but you'd have to design
your book and style sheet so that you avoided the bugs and unimplemented
features of the processor. Antenna House probably produces the most
polished output, and I'd use it if all I wanted to do was print out a
document from my laser printer. However, since I need PDF files I can
send to my editors and download to a typesetter, my choice for the time
being is PassiveTeX.
--
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| The XML Bible, 2nd Edition (Hungry Minds, 2001) |
| http://www.ibiblio.org/xml/books/bible2/ |
| http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0764547607/cafeaulaitA/ |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
| Read Cafe au Lait for Java News: http://www.cafeaulait.org/ |
| Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://www.ibiblio.org/xml/ |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
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Re: XSL Formatting Objects Chapter Updated
Posted by Max Froumentin <mf...@w3.org>.
Elliotte Rusty Harold <el...@metalab.unc.edu> writes:
> I'm happy to announce that I've posted a completely updated version of
> Chapter 15 of the XML Bible, XSL Formatting Objects, at Cafe con Leche:
Great, I'll make a link to it on the W3C XSL page asap.
[...]
> I'd very much appreciate it if you can inform me of
> any mistakes you spot so I can fix them.
Fix them? for the second edition or for the online version only?
I'll try and read it this week.
Max.
W3C XSL person.
Re: XSL Formatting Objects Chapter Updated
Posted by Dave Pawson <da...@dpawson.freeserve.co.uk>.
At 03:58 PM 9/30/00, you wrote:
>I'm happy to announce that I've posted a completely updated version of Chapter 15 of the XML Bible, XSL Formatting Objects, at Cafe con Leche:
>Since this is more-or-less what's going to go into the second edition of the XML Bible, as well as likely being the primary source for many new users learning XSL-FO, I'd very much appreciate it if you can inform me of any mistakes you spot so I can fix them.
I've had two four hour train journeys to read it :-)
so I have quite a few.
When i get them typed up I'll forward them.
Regards DaveP
www.dpawson.co.uk
Re: XSL Formatting Objects Chapter Updated
Posted by Arved Sandstrom <Ar...@chebucto.ns.ca>.
At 10:58 AM 9/30/00 -0400, you wrote:
>I'm happy to announce that I've posted a completely updated version
>of Chapter 15 of the XML Bible, XSL Formatting Objects, at Cafe con
>Leche:
>
>http://www.ibiblio.org/xml/books/bible/updates/15.html
>
>This is the complete chapter, approximately 70 pages with many full examples
>of XSL-FO. Everything should be up-to-date with the March 27, 2000
>Last Call working draft of the XSL-FO specification and FOP 0.14.0.
>To the best of my knowledge, this is the only comprehensive tutorial
>covering the current version of XSL-FO.
>
>Doubtless there are some errors since I was breaking new ground here
>and had to work from an incomplete and sometimes contradictory spec
>document, as well as using unfinished pre-alpha software. Since this
>is more-or-less what's going to go into the second edition of the XML
>Bible, as well as likely being the primary source for many new users
>learning XSL-FO, I'd very much appreciate it if you can inform me of
>any mistakes you spot so I can fix them.
>--
Hi, Elliotte
I downloaded the HTML and plan to review it. Thanks for posting the resource.
What timeframe are we talking about for comments, extra suggested examples,
etc?
One of the things that the XSL-FO WG needs during the Candidate
Recommendation period is submission of FO examples. This is to satisfy the
requirement that the spec is clear and consistent enough so that
implementors can use it. I'm not a member of the WG, just a FOP committer,
but I'm in touch with the WG in order to see how FOP can contribute and
cooperate with them. It strikes me that _you_ also fall into the category of
an implementor, although your implementation is a tutorial, not software. As
such, I'm interested because it seems to me that you can help the CR process
and thus benefit all of us. What do you think?
I put out a request for authors some time back on this list to write about
FOP for XML.COM, but I guess folks are occupied, so I'll end up writing it
myself. Would you be so kind as to be one of the reviewers for the article?
It's not just about FOP, but more about the state of the implementation
nation. :-) In addition, if you have some input or comments on XSL-FO
pertaining to implementation progress I'd be happy to consider them. As I
say, as a tutorial producer I consider you to be an implementor.
Regards, Arved Sandstrom
Senior Developer
e-plicity.com (www.e-plicity.com)
Halifax, Nova Scotia
"B2B Wireless in Canada's Ocean Playground"