Re: [docbook] DocBook tool chain recommendations?

[Steve Ball <Steve.Ball@explain.com.au>]

Rich,

Jirka's comments not withstanding, I get alot of mileage of out xsltproc and FOP.

xsltproc may suffer from the occasional bug, but these are generally quickly sorted out.  Daniel Veillard, et al, is very responsive and development of the application/libraries is very active.

FOP may be old, but it does the job.  For my own use FOP is very useful, especially the fact that it supports SVG images.  Only one of my clients has had to resort to a commercial formatter because of FOP limitations.

HTHs,

Steve Ball

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On 24/09/2005, at 2:59 AM, Rich Morin wrote:

I'm still trying to decide on an Open Source tool chain to use

for formatting DocBook into PDF.  I gather that the procedure

is to use an XSLT processor to process DocBook into XSL-FO,

then use an XSL-FO processor to generate the PDF.

Bob Stayton's "DocBook XSL: The Complete Guide" (Sagehill, 2003)

lists several possibilities for XSLT processors, including Saxon,

Xalan, and xsltproc.  I gather that xsltproc is a good choice, as

it is fast, free, and conformant to the specification.

This leaves me with the problem of formatting the XSL-FO into PDF.

Dave Pawson's "XSL-FO" book (O'Reilly, 2002) lists a number of

formatters.  http://webdesign.about.com/cs/xslformatters also

lists several possibilities.

PassiveTex is one possibility, but setting up an maintaining a TeX

suite just for this purpose may be onerous (though it would have

the advantage of providing access to TeX :-).

FOP is another possibility (and I've downloaded a copy to try out),

but it appears to be rather dated: the current version (0.20.5) was

created in 2003.

I'd rather not go down the wrong path, so I'm asking for comments,

cautions, and suggestions.  Help?

-r

P.S.  I'd look in the wiki (http://wiki.docbook.org) for all this,

      but it appears to be out of service:

        Cannot Load Address

        No such host wiki.docbook.org

      (I've sent a note to Norman Walsh, who owns the domain.)

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