Re: [docbook-apps] fop problems

[Alexander Schatten <alasan@gmx.at>]

David N. Welton wrote:

>Eventually, I will have to fix up the output in any case to make it
>better match the HTML, but I'm a bit disappointed that I didn't get
>something at least reasonable on the first go.  Any help or insights
>into what I must do to make things work at this point are more than
>welcome.
>
>
>  
>

you might be lucky getting these errors ;-) recently I just received a 
very brief error, somthing like "no content allowed before...?"

rumors say, that there are people you successfully used the fo 
stylesheets to produce usable PDF; as a matter of fact, I am trying this 
for about 3 years now; I download about every 6 month the recent 
stylesheets and test it with various processors, with no success so far. 
a brief summary of my experiences:

-- was not able to run DSSSL installation instructions for DSSSL gurus, 
no idea
-- xsl:fo + FOP either complete failure (like above), or a result, that 
is (was, last tests) nearly completly unusable: defect content, defect 
tables, lines running out of bounds... not even as draft usable
-- xsl:fo + XEP: this was the only combination that tolarably worked; 
result was not really good, but o.k. however xep is extremly expensive, 
and even in academic version you get the "Render X XEP" text on bottom 
of the page--->unusable
-- recently I tested docbook2pdf on my redhat linux, which gave 
refreshing good results---basically---but: no index was generated (dont 
know why) and even worse: all images where included far too big (out of 
boundaries), allthough they should fit easily.

I invested (over the years) at least weeks to try to get PDF/PS running, 
with really no acceptable success. so I use HTML output and maybe 
generate PDF from HTML, which is no optimal solution, but still much 
better then the FOP results.

and for the more important print documents I stay using LaTeX.


ah, yes, there should be a docbook-->latex processor.

docbook2tex

it generates tex, but I was not able to process this tex file; *lots* of 
errors with latex as well as with direct tex invocation.


so far, no results, unfortunately. I decided to use docbook for a large 
projecte about 3 years ago, because I assumed, that those problems would 
be temporarily and the tools with mature, but this seems not to be the 
case, rather the opposite (fop not even producing bad results, only 
errors) :-(


Alex