[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Future of Formatting Objects (XSL/FO)
Peter Murray-Rust wrote: > If we want high-quality print I can only think of the following: > - Develop XSL-FO and one or more FOP-like solutions > - Use TeX as an intermediate > - Tear up the current XSL-FO and try again Anyone reading that would probably be amazed to know that SGML data has actually made it to paper over the past couple of decades without the aid of TeX. :-) Seriously, you overlook at least two well established practices - one is using a tool like FrameMaker+SGML to generate hardcopy. Its typesetting capabilities are well regarded amongst professional publishers, so the addition of structure made it a powerful authoring environment, insulating the user from having to understand DTDs, etc. The second is writing code to turn the data into something that a typesetting engine can render - before you discount that, remember that you already have to do this to create FOs. The really nasty issue is that two applications making use of FOs are not required to produce identical results. This reflects the fact that writing a good typesetting engine is very difficult. People who have been involved with typesetting for any reasonable period of time accept that, and avoid problems by allowing themselves to be tied to a specific workflow in order to obtain a specific result. For example, suppose you had converted XML to RTF for print, then your customer phoned you to complain that their pages didn't look like the ones that they had signed off on. They're not importing the RTF into Word, but that shouldn't matter, right... The likely outcome is that FO data gets shipped with a "Best results with FO-bar version 1.0", just as now (informally) happens with other typesetting data. Believing that anything else will be acceptable flies in the face of what is currently acceptable practice with relation to the creation of data for hardcopy. If FO data was specifically created for a single application, why would I use it instead of just going directly to the syntax that the application dealt with anyway? (I don't consider portability to be a good reason - if the application is being used purely as an automated page generator, there is little reason to change it.) The whole idea of FO trivialises typesetting issues by adopting the approach that near enough is good enough. Imagine the reaction of programmers if an stream editor made subtle changes to their code, or for a scientist, if an application chose to render your complex formula slightly differently than it was created - that's the equivalent of what typesetters will be expected to accept with FO documents. -- Regards, Marcus Carr email: mrc@a... ___________________________________________________________________ Allette Systems (Australia) www: http://www.allette.com.au ___________________________________________________________________ "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." - Einstein *************************************************************************** This is xml-dev, the mailing list for XML developers. To unsubscribe, mailto:majordomo@x...&BODY=unsubscribe%20xml-dev List archives are available at http://xml.org/archives/xml-dev/ ***************************************************************************
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