Re: RFC: Beginner's vim tutorial
Thus spake dman on Sun, Jan 13, 2002 at 04:28:57PM -0500:
> On Sun, Jan 13, 2002 at 09:50:38PM +0100, Romain Lerallut wrote:
> | The printable version has always been not-quite-as-good as the
> | HTML version. That's a fact. I'm working on switching to XML, so
> | if FO is more customizable than dsssl, we might improve things a
> | bit.
>
> What's "FO"? Have you (or do you want to) try LaTeX? I've had good
> results with LaTeX (even with my limited knowledge) as long as I
> followed it's guide and didn't try to forcibly locate things on the
> page.
FO is "Formatting Object". It is an XML document specifically
designed to be translated into printer-friendly formats.
Docbook (whether in SGML or XML) makes it possible to write a
document that can be "compiled" into *nice-looking* HTML, and
besides it is *much* easier to write than LaTeX.
With a DocBook XML file, we have:
XML --[XSLT]--> HTML
XML --[XSLT]--> FO --[FO processor]--> ps,pdf
(see http://xml.apache.org/fop for a FO processor)
Sometimes FO->ps,pdf is really FO->TeX->ps,pdf, though not with
Apache's FOP (IIRC).
I've managed to almost duplicate the HTML we get from our old
SGML files with some testbed XML files, however I've not
succeeded yet in getting a printable format out of an XML file.
> | BTW, does everyone agree that PDF would be a better choice for
> | an online printable version ? (Knowing that a number of people will
> | print this on disreputable systems that have no postscript support :)
> | (Though I intend to keep postscript for the .deb)
>
> PDF is better for those sytems, PS is generally better for the rest,
> systems using CUPS can deal with both equally well. Besides, I think
> all the PDFs I've seen generated with tools like ps2pdf work find in
> ghostscript/gv/gnome-gv.
Ah , that's _good_ to know. I was afraid people would be forced to
use non-free stuff, like acroread.
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