Re: Converting XML into ODT document to print as paper

On Mon, 2020-09-28 at 15:20 +0000, Manuel Souto Pico
terminolator@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
> Thanks, Andre.
> 
> In the XML -> XSLT -> HTML + CSS/JS path, I was assuming it would be
> possible to print directly from the browser, in which case printing
> to an
> offline PDF file wouldn't be necessary. If it is not possible to
> print
> directly from the browser and it's necessary to create the PDF file,
> that
> wouldn't be a problem, but I as far as I am concerned, that step can
> be
> spared unless it is not skippable.

It can work either way,  depending on which CSS formatter you use.
There's not likely to be any need for JavaScript in that route, by the
way. CSS for print is declarative and not too hard.

The browsers themselves are very limited (Firefox probably is best).
And then there's e.g. paged.js which runs in the browser and can
produce printed books.

Then there are standalong formatters:

There are free products, although they are limited in their complexity.
For example, weasyprint (n Python) and others already mentioned.

Then there are commercial ones, such as PDRReactor, AntennaHouse
Formatter (AHF), and PrinceXML. A great many books in the New York
Times Bestseller list are produced with AHF or PrinceXML, for example,
and Bibles, dictionaries, aircraft manuals, and much more. AHF can also
format xsl-fo documents (along with RenderX, another product).However,
all of these are thousands of dollars.

You should be able to get basic paged formatting working with paged.js
in, say, under an hour, and then get your XSLT working - use Saxon, and
maybe the Oxygen XML development environment - in a little longer,
depending on your background.

And of course, there are lots of tutorials and courses, and lots of
hungry consultants to help in more detail :-)

Liam


-- 
Liam Quin,B https://www.delightfulcomputing.com/
Available for XML/Document/Information Architecture/XSLT/
XSL/XQuery/Web/Text Processing/A11Y training, work & consulting.
Barefoot Web-slave, antique illustrations: B http://www.fromoldbooks.org