Re: Spam:RE: Winddings, symbol etc

> FOP for example is more limited than the commercial
> renderers, but often you can tweak the xslfo to cheat it.

<bias>I'm something of a champion of FOP.</bias>

FOP has its limitations, for sure, but I've not found anything I couldn't 
do by using XSLT to produce FO that FOP knows how to process. Doing 
automatic layout for tables has been the nastiest bit, and I got that done 
in an afternoon.

Other than to stand up for FOP, I am replying because your project seems 
to be somewhat similar to the work I've done in recent years. I've created 
my own document production system to convert content stored in XML into 
PDF, WordML (just has to be opened in Word 2003 and Saved As .doc), text, 
and HTML (and sometimes other XML dialects). Thus, I edit documents in XML 
and then produce the documents in whatever format the client's customers 
want at the time. I'm actually a writer (but I have been programming for 
18 years in the course of documenting APIs) who got fed up with commercial 
software that was both expensive and crappy and so resolved to make his 
own document production system with open-source tools. So it sounds like 
our tasks are parallel in some significant ways.

Let me know if I can help you around some of the problems you hit.

However, for the current problem, I cannot help much, as I just use 
Unicode characters for everything I need (which isn't much - just the 
usual trademark and copyright symbols, some math symbols, and so on).

Jay Bryant
Bryant Communication Services
(presently consulting at Synergistic Solution Technologies)