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

[Alex Lancaster <alexl@users.sourceforge.net>]

>>>>> "DP" == Dave Pawson <dpawson@nildram.co.uk> writes:

DP> At 12:10 07/09/2002, Alex Lancaster wrote:
>> Ah!  XEP!  I thought so.  That's part of RenderX right?  I figured
>> you must be using something other than Fop and PassiveTeX, since
>> both Fop and PassiveTeX are lagging in their implementations of the
>> XSL-FO spec somewhat.

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.

A.
-- 
  Alex Lancaster | Free Software Developer:  savannah.gnu.org, sourceforge.net