Re: Yelp

[Malcolm Tredinnick <malcolm commsecure com au>]

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