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

[Nic Gibson <nicg@corbas.net>]

On 10 May 2012, at 01:22, Carlos Araya wrote:

> 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

You are absolutely right about this but for large classes of books this is irrelevant. We've found that most b&w text can be done up and including academic monographs with tables and charts (although chart positioning is not perfect)

> Typography is weak (at least with the open source tools available)

FOP has poor typography and FO itself isn't really up to the standard of a page layout tool but for many purposes it's good enough. Once you start talking real money (such as the Antenna House tools) the situation gets a lot better.

It definitely isn't a technology for spread based layouts thought.

We've done proofs of concept on FO based publishing with two large UK publishers and are looking at a third. The second client is looking at how to use the tools in a production environment at the moment.

The biggest problem is the lack of support for signatures and that is in the 2.0 wishlist. One of the big issues we've seen with our clients is that publishers see the W3C as irrelevant to them. This means that publishing industry representation on the FO committee is poor.

nic
> 
> 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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