[XSL-LIST Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: XSL-FO versus PostScript
This will undoubtedly sound like a tautology, but a meaningful answer (one
that is highly persuasive for me, at least) is that "XSL FO is XML". If
you've ever coded in TeX, or even in LaTeX, you'll have an idea of just how
painful it can be. I have done very significant amounts of raw TeX coding
and have quite a few gray hairs to show for it. By contrast, writing
documents in XML is merely tedious and there are already tools that allow
the process to be a bit less painful still. Once I have a document coded
in XML, I can "repurpose" the document from hardcopy (e.g., PostScript) to
screen (e.g., PDF) to web browser (e.g., HTML) simply by writing additional
stylesheets and then (for XSL FO) rendering the result into the final
form. The ability to have all of my documents in XML is worth quite a
lot. They become searchable (think XQuery), transformable (think XSLT),
and (as I just described) repurposable. None of those things are nearly as
true for documents written using TeX.
Now, if you have highly specialized publishing needs, then you need to find the tool/system that does the job you need. Not very many business documents have a burning need to print text in a spiral on the page, but clearly some do (e.g., advertisements). XML and XSLT and XSL FO are probably not good candidates for that sort of document. However, that combination is absolutely dynamite for producing the thousands of pages of documentation that go along with complex software systems, airplane construction, nuclear power plant design, and scores of other applications. Message? Choose the appropriate tool for the job. Raw PostScript is good at some things and bad at others. The same is true of Tex, of LaTeX, of XML, of SQL, of Fortran, of Java, etc. etc. etc. "..very cool..." is certainly one criterion to use, but my boss would much rather pay for useful functionality than the cool factor ;^) Hope this helps, Jim At 19:06 2003-02-27 -0800 Thursday, Zack Brown wrote: On Thu, Feb 27, 2003 at 07:52:46PM +0000, David Carlisle wrote: > > > > Wouldn't that be very cool? > > well it would be very familiar at least. > Anyone using a postscript back end to (la)tex typesetting has been able > to do all those kind of things for a couple of decades or so. > I don't think it really fits with the FO model though. > the point of FO is that it intentionally cuts out lots of device > specific processing so that it can be a cross platform language > for specifying the style and layout.
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