"Eric S. Raymond" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, 2006-12-23 18:01 -0500:
> FOP is at 0.92 level now. I'm not sure that should be seen as a sign of stability. Certainly it shouldn't be seen as sign that it's anywhere close to being compliant with the XSL-FO 1.0 spec (it isn't). And anyway, the release previous to 0.92 was numbered 0.20.5, so they made pretty big leap in version numbering. And 0.92 is basically a complete redesign of the previous code. > What with Java going open, I expect the > DocBook -> XSL:FO -> PostScript path via FOP will get really good > sometime in 2007 or early 2008. I'd love to see that happen, but the I have to say that I think the odds of FOP getting there by then are pretty slim. I've followed FOP since its beginning (before it was even an Apache project), and (along with a lot of other people) used to have pretty high hopes for it getting to production quality. I don't any more. Unless there's some dramatic change -- some more/new developers going to work on it -- I don't think it will ever get there. It'll remain useful for generating output from simple documents, but not for anything beyond that. I'd love to be proven wrong, though. There is a alternative open-source DocBook-to-PDF/Postscript option that already produces better output than FOP in many cases. It's db2latex: http://db2latex.sourceforge.net/ It doesn't use XSL-FO at all. Instead it translates DocBook to LaTeX and then uses TeX to generate output from that. I think that approach is suboptimal; it'd be a lot better to have a good open-source XSL-FO engine. But we don't have one, and lacking one, db2latex seems to me the best way to get good PDF/print output from DocBook *if you restrict yourself to only using free software*. If you don't, you can use RenderX XEP (which, is for use in generating documention for open-source software, free-as-in-beer), and get professional-quality output. The open-source XSL-FO engine project that truly deserves some more help is Tony Graham's xmlroff: http://www.xmlroff.org/ It's a C application that uses the GNOME Print library and GLib, GObject and Pango libraries as its backend (it doesn't use *roff at all except in its name). The only thing it lacks is some more developers to move it further along toward XSL-FO 1.0 compliance. --Mike -- Michael(tm) Smith http://www.w3.org/People/Smith/ _______________________________________________ Groff mailing list Groff@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/groff
