Re: [docbook-apps] PDF-like HTML output

The main issue for me is that, to my knowledge, there is no open source solution that works with CSS Paged media and its associated generated content) and none of the available commercial solutions is cheap. Prince XML allows you to do development without a license but not commercial use. Whether good or bad there are several FO processors in the open source market.

There is also an issue of extensions. I'm not totally against doing this for Docbook but you then have to choose how will you implement those instructions without cluttering your CSS with prefixed selectors. It's not like FO where you can code the extensions as separate packages and then use a parameter to reference the extensions. I guess you could create separate stylesheets for Antenna House, Prince XML and other CSS PM processors but then it becomes a maintainability issue.

The final question I'd have before jumping into CSS Paged Media development is for what version of the stylesheets? The current version still has some ugly kludges inherited from the distant past but it's what we have. XSLT2 stylesheets have not made it to the main stylesheet distribution yet.

All that said, there's nothing stopping you from porting your css stylesheets to the XSLT1 packkage and submitting them for inlusion, whether they are accepted or not I can't predict.

On Fri, Aug 14, 2015 at 1:38 PM, Winslow Dalpe <rwdalpe@gmail.com> wrote:

I have a little experience in this arena with my latest project. A great resource I found for things like dynamic page numbers and other features was this article

http://alistapart.com/article/building-books-with-css3

In it they actually discuss the table of contents issue you mention.

For reference, if you want to see what I personally have done with it so far, you can take a look at the html output at http://rwdalpe.github.io/two-graves/player-guide/

There's a link to the PDF output at the top of the page.

Princexml is the tool I have been using to convert html+css into PDF.

So far I have found this preferable to xsl-fo and haven't encountered a killer missing feature yet.

On 8/9/15 4:45 PM, Jan Tosovsky wrote:
> Dear All,
>
> (1) there was lot of work in W3 recently dedicated in CSS for paged media
> (2) there are conversion tools from HTML+CSS to PDF utilizing these features
> (3) some interesting _javascript_ libraries have appeared (e.g.
> vivliostyle.js) emulating the intended rendering to 'yet inmature' browsers
> (polyfills)
>
> which make me wonder if there is an interest in making some kind of
> reference implementation of PDF-like output in HTML+CSS from DocBook source,
> especially for (3). Has anybody any experience with it?

There were some mumblings a while ago that this might be the direction
of print output, seeing that XSL-FO doesn't have much activity anymore.
So more investigation is surely welcome.

I played with this a while ago, and while you can get pretty good
looking "print" output with fairly little effort, there are some obvious
functionality gaps, such as: How do you produce a table of contents with
page numbers?

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