DOCBOOK-APPS: FOP as PDF processor for DocBook

[Aidan Mark Humphreys <ahumphreys@procoma.de>]

Has anyone experience of using FOP to render DocBook conformant documents to
PDF using Norman's stylesheets?

I have been experimenting with some of the example files provided with the
DocBook stylesheets (experimental 1.28) and have not achieved
great results using FOP.

I'm using the latest FOP 0.16.0 DEV, and Xelan and Xerces as supporting
components (both newest releases form Apache.org).

Using the supplied file book.xml I manage to obtain a PDF. However when I
insert a simple informaltable into the file:

     <informaltable frame="all">
       <tgroup cols="4">
         <thead>
           <row>
             <entry>Architecture</entry>
             <entry>Company</entry>
             <entry>Native code support</entry>
             <entry>Max optimization</entry>
           </row>
         </thead>
         <tbody>
           <row>
             <entry>i386</entry>
             <entry>Intel</entry>
             <entry>yes</entry>
             <entry>-O4</entry>
           </row>
           <row>
             <entry>alpha</entry>
             <entry>DEC</entry>
           <entry>yes</entry>
           <entry>-O3</entry>
         </row>
         <row>
           <entry>Z80</entry>
           <entry>Zilog</entry>
           <entry>no</entry>
           <entry>-O1</entry>
         </row>
       </tbody>
     </tgroup>
   </informaltable>

FOP renders the table without a frame and with all the entries overprinted
on the left hand side of the page. Basically the table layout doesn't seem
to work at all.

Rending the file book2.xml issues multiple Warning messages

WARNING: current implementation of tables requires a table-column for each
column, indicating column-width

 and finally terminates abnormally with the following message:

FATAL ERROR: list-item-label must have exactly one block in this version of
FOP.

the PDF is not produced.

Are these well  known problems - does anyone know when FOP is likely to be
able to
render DocBook conformant XML?

Are there avoiding actions one can take to work around at least the table
problem ? Is there an older release of the stylesheets using less FO
features or can the stylesheets be "simplified" to avoid some of these
issues?

Aidan