Hi Fabien, You wrote: > I would like to know the current trend in XSL processing. I'm > currently writing a document in docbook-xml using Norman Walsh XSL > stylesheet. Especially, I need good catalog parsing and chunking > output support since many of my projects used special XSL/DTD > definitions. My current setup used saxon+saxon-catalog for the xslt > part, with fop+xalan for the xsl-fo to PDF part. Is it currently the > best combinaison? Currently, you'll probably get better PDF output from Jade/Openjade and the DSSSL stylesheets (which you can use with XML, not just SGML). > What about long term development? The open source XSL-FO engines (FOP and Passivetex) ain't quite there yet, but still, IMHO, the world would start to be a better place if more people tried to make the move away from DSSSL to the XSL toolchain. Norm and other DocBook Open Repository developers working on the DocBook stylesheets are focused on the XSL stylesheets, not DSSSL. The more people who use the XSL-FO toolchain, the more more incentive there will be for improvement of the existing open-source XSL-FO engines and/or development of alternative ones. There are a couple proprietary engines -- RenderX XEP and the XSL-FO implementation in Arbortext Epic -- that pretty much work flawlessly. So a good complete open-source implementation of the spec is do-able. > I'm looking forward to try Xalan or xsltproc for XSLT transformation. > I would also like to try passivetex but aren't currently able to make > it work. Any hints about them? Should they worth the effort? xsltproc is a great for working with DocBook, Xalan isn't. There's been a known bug for a while now that makes some features of the DocBook XSL stylesheets unusable with Xalan. There have been some bugs with xsltproc and the stylesheets, but once Daniel Veillard is able to reproduce them, he fixes them very quickly. Saxon also works with DocBook. There hasn't been significant new development on Passivetex in a long time, despite known reproducable bugs and lots of enhancement requests. Its sole developer, Sebastian Rahtz, doesn't have time to work on it, I guess, and nobody else has jumped in to help out. > I would also like to use XML Schema but failed to find any PSGML-like > support for them. Is any of you used it? How? I've not personally found any need yet to use an W3C XML Schema-aware editor for working with DocBook. And so far I don't think there has been any outcry for schema "features" (datatypes, whatever else) in DocBook that can't be specified using an old-fashioned DTD. If/when PSGML and whatever other open-source XML tools begin to support schema syntax other than DTDs, it would be great if instead of W3C XML Schema, they started by supporting RELAX NG, which is every bit as powerful (or more) than the W3C XML Schema language, but massively easier to learn and use and to implement support for in tools. HTH, --Mike
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