I've used FOP for some DocBook-to-PDF transformations and had no trouble with it. But I haven't pressed it very far, and I don't think there were any tables involved. There's a compliance chart at the FOP site:
http://xml.apache.org/fop/compliance.html
Peter
Peter Binkley Digital Initiatives Technology Librarian Information Technology Services 4-30 Cameron Library University of Alberta Libraries Edmonton, Alberta Canada T6G 2J8 Phone: (780) 492-3743 Fax: (780) 492-9243 e-mail: peter.binkley@ualberta.ca
-----Original Message----- From: dm-l-bounces@uleth.ca [mailto:dm-l-bounces@uleth.ca] On Behalf Of Daniel O'Donnell Sent: Sunday, April 03, 2005 09:45 PM To: Peter Baker Cc: Digital Medievalist Community mailing list Subject: Re: [dm-l] TAN: Unicode, XML, and LaTeX
The Digital Medievalist List (see end of message for contact information and project URLs).
What scared me off XSL-FO was a recurring theme on TEI-L that suggested that XSL-FO engines are too expensive or too poor to be used very much by academics. In particular, it is claimed that the free ones don't do tables very well, and the ones that do do tables well are expensive. I'll take a look at the ones you suggest; I'm also looking at Context, though, as somebody noted, it ain't consumer friendly in its set up. On TEI-L, it has often been suggested that XML-ers can see LaTeX largely as a PDF engine.
I must say that two days intensive work with LaTeX has left me with mixed feelings. On the one hand, I can produce a very neat looking articles suitable for immediate publication in Phys Rev Letters. On the other hand, the whole system seems pretty old fashioned. It claims to separate content and form, but it doesn't really: all markup is basically format oriented. It looks like the system the original HTML design was probably based on. SGML and XML are a conceptual leap forward, although SGML suffered from a terrible lack of delivery mechanisms, and XML seems to be suffering from the lack of a consumer oriented Print/PDF mechanism.
So in short, I think as an old SGML/XMLer, I'd rather stick with a concept I understand (trees and XPATH), that convert a tree model to a process-model like LaTeX seems to be; but I'd also prefer my output to be cheap and easy to produce, without limitations (for example) on the type of tables I can produce. My immediate goal for learning some kind of XML > typesetting language is to see if I can automate the production of Brodart call-number stickers for my personal library (I'm a dork, as my neighbour has repeatedly noted), something that requires me ultimately to set a very unusual page size. This is not hard to do in XSL-FO, as far as I can tell, but quite difficult in LaTeX: another reason to stick with FO, if I can.
Jargon Watch: XSL: eXtensible Stylesheet Language (a language for converting XML to output formats) XSL-FO: a language for converting XML to (amongst other things) print and PDF TeX and LaTeX: a typesetting language (and variant) used by natural scientists (for the most part) to typeset articles and books. XML: an HTML-like language used for encoding text structurally. SGML: an early version of XML HTML: the language used to encode web pages XPATH: an XML standard TEI-L: mailing list of the Text Encoding Initiative
-dan
Peter Baker wrote:
Dan,
I won't try to cover any of the ground that John
McChesney-Young has
covered in his post, except to say that that is also my
sense of the
state of LaTeX right now: support for UTF-8 is still clunky, and Unicode/OpenType fonts are not natively supported. To judge
from its
website the promising Omega project seems to have stalled.
I'm wondering if you've considered XSL-FO as a way to get
from TEI to
PDF. Apache's FOP (see http://xml.apache.org/fop/) is
supposed to be a
good free implementation. If I recall correctly, earlier
versions of
FOP used TeX or LaTeX to output PDF files, but now it
outputs directly
to PDF. There's a great advantage to staying within XML to do a job like producing a PDF: you use an XSLT script to output an
FO file, and
then send that to FOP.
There are also commercial products for working with FO (here's one with a free academic license: http://www.renderx.com/download/academic.html), and some of them sound far easier to use than FOP. Being rather perverse, I'd probably stick with FOP myself. I'll bet there's some experience getting TEI to FOP on this list.
Peter
Daniel O'Donnell wrote:
The Digital Medievalist List (see end of message for contact information and project URLs).
Hi all, I've been playing with LaTex (actually MikTex) as a TEI2PDF conversion method, and I have a question about unicode support for LaTex that members of this list might have a better handle on than the TUG group seems to. What is the best method of handling UTF-8 XML code in LaTeX2e? Recent discussion (i.e. Feb 2005) on the various mailing lists archived at TUG seem to suggest this is something that is
difficult
to do and won't really be resolved until LaTeX 3. I'm sure members here have some practical experience. Thanks. -dan
P.S. I'm cross posting this in tei-l; apologies for the
double messages.
-- Daniel Paul O'Donnell, PhD Associate Professor of English University of Lethbridge Lethbridge AB T1K 3M4 Tel. (403) 329-2377 Fax. (403) 382-7191 E-mail daniel.odonnell@uleth.ca Home Page http://people.uleth.ca/~daniel.odonnell/ The Digital Medievalist Project: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/
Digital Medievalist Project Homepage: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org Journal (December 2004-): http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/journal.cfm RSS (announcements) server: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/rss/rss2.cfm Wiki: http://sql.uleth.ca/dmorgwiki/index.php Change membership options: http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/listinfo/dm-l Submit RSS announcement: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/newitem.cfm Contact editorial Board: digitalmedievalist@uleth.ca dm-l mailing list dm-l@uleth.ca http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/listinfo/dm-l
-
Binkley, Peter