[changing cc to -sgml] On Tue, Mar 11, 2003 at 02:46:07PM -0500, Norman Walsh wrote: > / Aaron Isotton <aaron@isotton.com> was heard to say: > | The transformations work as follows: > | > | - XML -> FO using > | /usr/share/sgml/docbook/stylesheet/xsl/nwalsh/fo/docbook.xsl. This part > | works fine, BUT it doesn't respect /etc/papersize. xmlto has a hack in > | it to do that, but other problems (follow). > > There's no obvious way to make the base stylesheets respect > /etc/papersize. The papersize can be passed as a parameter, and that > parameter can come from /etc/papersize, but the stylesheet itself > can't look there. (XSL stylesheets can't load non-XML documents.) which had me thinking that libpaper-utils could create an xml document in addition to /etc/papersize, and the stylesheet could read that, but then you forget about environment variables. i think the solution xmlto uses (generate an xml stylesheet that imports docbook xsl on the fly) works decently. > | - FO -> DVI using xmltex. One might think that this should work the > | same as FO -> PDF, but this is not the case. It works with toy "sample" > | documents, but not with longer and more complex ones. > > Using TeX to read FO and produce PDF is an interesting exercise, it seems that god did not intend tex and fo to marry happily. > but I don't think it's being actively developed. passivetex is being updated upstream. > As far as free FO formatters go, I'm holding my breath for > https://sourceforge.net/projects/xmlroff/ (Fair disclosure: I work for > Sun. But I'd still support Tony even if I didn't.) though is it really free? pangopdf, used by xmlroff, uses pdflib, which is apparently non-free (see #182445). i admit though, it looks promising. > | I'd very much appreciate if somebody with more knowledge of xslt and tex > | than I have could look into the problem; I also think that it would be > | much better if the maintainers of the relevant packages would check the > | toolchain with some "real" documents (as available from > | http://cvs.debian.org/*checkout*/?cvsroot=debian-doc) instead of some > | upstream-supplied sample documents. > > And therein lies part of the problem. While I accept responsibility > for the stylesheets and I'll do my part to make them work better for > Debian, I can't test the whole toolchain. > > I wouldn't be surprised if all of the maintainers are in a similar > position. being the maintainer of xmlto, which is a tool that drives the entire toolchain, im in an ok place to do testing (which i try to do). -- gram
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