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

[Robin Lee Powell <rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org>]

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