Re: DOCBOOK-APPS: Re: FO stylesheets compatibility with PassiveTex andFop

[Martin Perina <martin.perina@osu.cz>]

On St, 2002-09-11 at 06:03, Alex Lancaster wrote:
> DP> I'd rather the stylesheets be compliant with the spec (XSL-FO)
> DP> than single vendor aligned, whether open src or commercial.  I'd
> DP> agree that XEP + Antenna House are the most compliant today, hence
> DP> it seems right that that's what Norm is using?
> 
> Don't get me wrong, I'm all for generating 100% XSL-FO spec-compliant
> .fo files, giving a target for all implementations (open source or
> proprietary) to aim for, so XEP is a fine thing to use to test the
> stylesheets, but it shouldn't be the *only* thing to test the output.
> 
> All I'm suggesting is that the current versions of the stylesheets
> should offer fallbacks gracefully to only use the subset of the XSL-FO
> that are known to be implemented for the two main open source
> implementations (PassiveTeX and Fop) of XSL-FO.  
> 
> Since many users cannot afford the proprietary solution (or don't want
> to use a proprietary tool for ethical reasons), but would otherwise
> like to be able to help test, debug and use the XSL-FO tool chain with
> only open-source tools, not at least catering for the minimal changes
> to restrict the XSL-FO output to the known working subset for the
> open-source implementations seems shortsighted (of course, ultimately
> these tools will catchup with the XSL-FO sooner or later).
> 
> After all, the mere presence of the (passivetex,fop}.extensions.
> parameters, in effect, suggest to the user that they stylesheets will
> at least work (in a minimal sense of generating an output PDF) with
> these tools.

I agree, FO result is not final result for me and, I think, for most
stylesheets users. Stylesheets, that generates 100% compatible FO
output, are useless, when we don't have any processor, that can render
it. We should try stylesheets to work with at least one free renderer, 
because most users uses DocBook for creating opensource projects'
documentation.


Martin Perina