Re: [docbook] DocBook tool chain recommendations?

[Steve Ball <Steve.Ball@explain.com.au>]

Rich,

Jirka's comments not withstanding, I get alot of mileage of out xsltproc and FOP.

xsltproc may suffer from the occasional bug, but these are generally quickly sorted out.� Daniel Veillard, et al, is very responsive and development of the application/libraries is very active.

FOP may be old, but it does the job.� For my own use FOP is very useful, especially the fact that it supports SVG images.� Only one of my clients has had to resort to a commercial formatter because of FOP limitations.

HTHs,

Steve Ball

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On 24/09/2005, at 2:59 AM, Rich Morin wrote:

I'm still trying to decide on an Open Source tool chain to use

for formatting DocBook into PDF.� I gather that the procedure

is to use an XSLT processor to process DocBook into XSL-FO,

then use an XSL-FO processor to generate the PDF.

Bob Stayton's "DocBook XSL: The Complete Guide" (Sagehill, 2003)

lists several possibilities for XSLT processors, including Saxon,

Xalan, and xsltproc.� I gather that xsltproc is a good choice, as

it is fast, free, and conformant to the specification.

This leaves me with the problem of formatting the XSL-FO into PDF.

Dave Pawson's "XSL-FO" book (O'Reilly, 2002) lists a number of

formatters.� http://webdesign.about.com/cs/xslformatters also

lists several possibilities.

PassiveTex is one possibility, but setting up an maintaining a TeX

suite just for this purpose may be onerous (though it would have

the advantage of providing access to TeX :-).

FOP is another possibility (and I've downloaded a copy to try out),

but it appears to be rather dated: the current version (0.20.5) was

created in 2003.

I'd rather not go down the wrong path, so I'm asking for comments,

cautions, and suggestions.� Help?

-r

P.S.� I'd look in the wiki (http://wiki.docbook.org) for all this,

� � � but it appears to be out of service:

� � � � Cannot Load Address

� � � � No such host wiki.docbook.org

� � � (I've sent a note to Norman Walsh, who owns the domain.)

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