Re: [docbook-apps] Enable FOP's PCL duplexing feature with DocBook XSL stylesheet customization?

[Warren Young <warren@etr-usa.com>]

On Sep 8, 2017, at 1:33 PM, Jirka Kosek <jirka@kosek.cz> wrote:
> 
> On 7.9.2017 17:46, Warren Young wrote:
>> Unfortunately, grepping the DBX FO XSL files in the version of the stylesheets packaged for my OS turns up no instances of “duplex”.
> 
> That's because XSL-FO and DocBook stylesheets are dealing with
> formatting and pagination. How these pages are printed onto physical
> paper is out of scope of these technologies.

FO comes into it because that’s the level where FOP defines the feature.  As you say, FO has nothing to do with paper handling, but PCL does, and FOP has a PCL output mode.  This feature is therefore the only way to communicate this information between the input and output (FO and PCL) sides of FOP.

> Usually you will produce PDF not PCL

Our application produces both: PDF as the primary document storage mechanism plus a paper copy for the files in case of data loss.

Historically, it’s always been a 1-page document, so it’s no biggie to print it.

I now need duplexing because we just added enough new material to the document to push it to 2 pages, so I’d like to keep printing it onto a single piece of paper.

> and then instruct PDF viewer
> together with print driver to do things like duplex printing, or two
> pages on one sheet printing, etc.

That’s our workaround right now: use gs -dDuplex to render the PDF to PCL instead of letting FOP do it.  I was just hoping to get that reprocessing step out of the middle.

> it's first time I hear that someone is using
> PCL backend in FOP. ;-)

I’d bet that most printers which can handle both PCL and PS/PDF will render PCL much faster than PS/PDF.  PS/PDF just *looks* fast on the desktop where you have a multicore multigigahertz box to render that pig. :)