Re: [gnome-db]GUADEC decisions

[David Huttleston Jr <dhjr hddesign com>]

Hey Rodrigo,
  We use XSL and FOP (find FOP at http://xml.apache.org/) to create
printed reports.  It is truly the way of the future, but it does have
many problems at present.  Here are some pros and cons we have learned
by experience.

FOP
Pro- excellent automation support, very scalable.
Con- font support is very basic (Adobe Type 1 only)
Con- table rending is excellent, but buggy
Pro- it's under heavy active development

XSLT
Pro- HTML rendering is simpler and more stable than rendering PDF
Pro- CSS2 provides very fancy visual rendering
Con- CSS2 has no way to do page numbers (proposed for CSS3)
Con- HTML and CSS2 completely rely on browsers for client-side
     presentation.  CSS2 is only partially supported in most
     browsers.  There are many small but important differences 
     in how browsers render HTML and CSS2.
Pro- Some platforms have GUI report designers for XSLT, but
     they are closed-source. :-(

Does anyone know of other open-source FO renders, like to PS?

Later,
  Dave

On Mon, Apr 09, 2001 at 09:34:15PM +0200, Rodrigo Moya wrote:
> Hi all!
> 
> Well, I'm back from GUADEC, and here are the decisions we've made. It
> was a pity that only Carlos and I were there from gnome-db.
> 
> So, please, comment on it so that you can also participate in the
> decision, if you want.
> 
> * user interface: currently, it is a crap, very confusing, and not very
> user-friendly. Things to do are to use wizards for configuration stuff,
> add keybindings, and rework some of the widgets. I would be very
> grateful to people suggesting UI stuff, even what would be great is to
> provide me with a .glade file, which is very easy to do. But well, just
> suggestions would also be welcomed :-)
> * report engine: I've been talking with some XML guys (Joaquin, Ismael),
> and I've finally understood what XSLT is, and I now know it is the way
> to go. So, the report engine would only generate XSLT, and, as Joaquin
> suggested, we could have a "converter" to be compatible with
> gnome-print, so that the XSLT returned by the engine can be easily
> accessed and used by clients.
> Thus, the clients would be the responsible for generating output in
> other formats (PDF, PS, etc).
> 
> so, how does it sound?
> 
> cheers
> 
> -- 
> Rodrigo Moya <rodrigo gnome-db org> <rodrigo ximian com>
> http://www.gnome-db.org/
> 
> 
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