Re: [xsl] Convert xml to PDF

[Bertrand Delacretaz <bdelacretaz at codeconsult dot ch>]

On Monday 08 October 2001 14:46, Mailer Mailer wrote:
> FO is I think in the draft stage and I don't know how
> many bugs I am going to face with that.

Right - AFAIK all current FO tools implement only a subset of the FO spec 
(which is itself currently at the "proposed recommendation" stage, so fairly 
stable).

On the other hand, FO to PDF formatters are already widely used in production 
settings. I think you need a bit of pioneer spirit, but not a whole lot of it 
;-)

> Can anyone give me the strong points to use FOs?
Standards:
With FO your formatting chain will be based on existing and documented 
standards, helps a lot for future maintenance.

Layout:
Generating PDF code "by hand" is of course possible, but how will you know 
how much space a string needs? page breaks? hyphenation? table layout? 
justification?

Unless your PDF documents are dead simple, you will most probably find 
yourself having to reimplement layout algorithms provided by FO formatters.

-- 
 -- Bertrand Delacrétaz, www.codeconsult.ch
 -- web technologies consultant - OO, Java, XML, C++






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