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Subject: Re: [docbook] Status of PDF output with DocBook + XSL + FO?
"Robert P. J. Day" <rpjday@mindspring.com> writes: [...] > clearly not a docbook-related question, but i've been using xsltproc+FOP > to generate my PDF output for quite some time now, with the addition of > sun's jdk 1.4.2. FOP is still incomplete, but getting better all the > time. <rant> As better as FOP may be getting, IMHO, it is still way, way short of being useful for generating any kind of production-quality PDF output, unless you want to spend a bunch of time making workarounds (in your FO stylesheet customization layer and/or in your DocBook XML source) to compensate for FOP deficiencies. Of-the-shelf, in my experience at least, it's almost adequate for generating draft output, but that's it. Unless your documents are relatively simple and your standards (and your users' standards) for PDF quality are relatively humble, I think you'd be much better off, if your an individual, trying to manage to pay the US $300 for an individual user license for XEP, or, if you're in a corporate environment, getting a developer or server license. IMHO, it's well worth the money. Yeah, I know it's a proprietary app, but when you've got real work to do, it comes down to thinking about more than just the application cost. There's an adage about free software: "It's only free only as long as your time is worth nothing", which ain't totally fair, but still has a lot of truth to it. If your main reason for using free software is to reduce your costs, and you need to blow, say 10 hours of your personal time (conservatie estimate) tweaking your kit to get decent output from FOP, you might be better off paying the $300 for XEP and having that time free instead to do other work (or play). Yeah, I know, outside of it being no-cost, there are lots of other reasons for using and contributing to free software development -- one of the main ones being that you have access to the source code and can alter to have the app do whatever you want. But in the case of FO engines, it seems like there's not all that much need to do that -- you just want the engine to do what you expect, what the XSL-FO spec says it should do. XEP does that. All that said, there are of course many open-source apps that pretty much obviate the need for non-free alternatives: libxml/libxslt, for example, or Apache's http server. But FOP ain't in that class. </rant> --Mike
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