Re: Yelp

[Aaron Weber <aaron ximian com>]

I'd like it if you would really consider just printing the HTML, even if it's only a stopgap measure. We need to think not only of "What is the Right Thing for an Ideal Perfect Product" but "What is Achievable"-- and that, for now, is printing the existing display. 

Not only that, but for 99% of users, printing the page they're on, printing what they can see right in front of them, is what's going to make sense anyway.

Use case: I am changing my init settings and I need to do a couple things as the machine boots, while Yelp is not running. I need them written down on paper so I can refer to them while X and Yelp are off. 

If we wait for FOP, or XSL/FO, or xsltproc, or any of that nonsense, we're waiting for Godot. FOP, as far as I've seen, is a research project and not a legitimate solution-- it requires separate libraries for including an image, for example, and those libraries can't be shipped with the rest of things. I spent a week trying to install and compile and eventually I got nowhere, gave up, and went back to DSSSL to produce PDFs. Not pretty.

Sorry if this comes across as a little harsh, I don't mean it to be. Just suggestions of course, and you're welcome to disregard them, although I would appreciate your consideration.

thx,

a.

On Thu, 2004-01-29 at 00:07 +1100, Malcolm Tredinnick wrote: 
> On Wed, 2004-01-28 at 20:47, Shaun McCance wrote:
> [...]
> > Yes, agreed.  So what I really want is a high-quality rendering of the
> > DocBook source, rather than just printing the HTML.  Proper rendering
> > for the screen is wholly different from proper rendering for the page. 
> > We can get much more beautiful prints if we start from DocBook and just
> > bypass HTML altogether.
> > 
> > That, again, is a fairly good amount of work.  What would really help is
> > a library to turn XSL-FO into PS/PDF.  The only decent one I know of is
> > FOP, but it's Java.
>
> And I wouldn't be throwing words like "decent" around too freely for
> FOP, either. It is acceptable in many cases, but it is very easy  to hit
> places were it just completely fails to do a reasonable job. I would
> agree that it is probably the best freely available system out there at
> the moment, though.
>
> The xmlroff project was an interesting idea on this front -- trying to
> use Pango to lay out FO files. Unfortunately, it has some fairly
> insurmountable implementation problems (circular dependencies if you use
> the gnomeprint backend -- which is more or less compulsory since pdflib
> has a GNOME-unfriendly license -- and requires a hacked up Pango, rather
> than choosing to work nicely with mainline Pango). The design from this
> project seems like a reasonable idea to follow-up, but it needs somebody
> able to throw a lot of time at it.
>
> Malcolm
>
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