Re: So, no books? (was Re: [docbook-apps] Re: Future of XSL-FO)

[Carlos Araya <carlos.araya@gmail.com>]

Robin:

When I expressed my opinion of FO being as complete as it needed to be perhaps I should have clarified a few things. 

Is Docbook a viable way to publish book-based content. Yes, it is

Is it as complete as it need to be for me to consider it a full-fledged book publishing tool. No, and here are the reasons why I think this is the case.

You cannot do absolute positioning of content on a page
Typography is weak (at least with the open source tools available)

If anyone can point me to resources that address those two areas, I'll be more than happy to be proved wrong. 

Carlos

On May 9, 2012, at 12:28 PM, Robin Lee Powell wrote:

> On Wed, May 09, 2012 at 11:34:25AM -0700, Carlos Araya wrote:
>> The people at lxml-dev will only get half the conversation but
>> here it goes.
>> 
>> XSL-FO is as complete as it needs to be, for the domain it is used
>> in. People who have been in the standard bodies can confirm or
>> deny this but I believe that FO was not meant for book publishing
>> but to be used in conjunction with XSL to produce short articles
>> and reports.
> 
> Wow, that's ... quite something.
> 
> So, basically, there's no sane, supported toolchain for producing
> books from doc*book*?
> 
> I mean, the options I'm aware of that are actually usable are
> XSL-FO, which apparently isn't *for* that, and dblatex, which is
> certainly usable but isn't really about docbook at all, it's about
> transforming docbook into something book-able.
> 
> Am I missing something?  I take it, therefore, that the pro/paid
> XSL-FO solutions are a bunch of hacks on top of XSL-FO?
> 
> -Robin

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