Re: pdf creation suggestions

[csj@mindgate.net]

On Mon, 28 Apr 2003 13:15:19 -0400,
David Z Maze wrote:
> 
> grandmother <grandmother@telia.com> writes:
> 
> > pdf creation suggestion
> >
> > What are the choises for pdf creation with "advanced" layout.
> 
> You haven't really described what you want at all.  Lots of
> things create PDFs, though; there are multiple routes to go
> from LaTeX to PDF, for example, and if what you're trying to do
> is a presentation there are several LaTeX packages to do that.
> You could also do SGML/XML to PDF (via jade/pdfjadetex or
> xsltproc/FOP), but the tools are poorly documented, hard to
> understand, and don't always work well.[1]
> 
> If you insist on "advanced", though, you can hand-write
> PostScript and then use ps2pdf or something equivalent to
> generate a PDF.  :-)

scribus.  There's a debian package for it.  It's essentially a QT
(without KDE dependencies) program.  I think it's the most
advanced DFSG-free what-you-see-is-(almost)-what-you-get DTP tool
in GNU/Linux.

Or you can use something from the corporation that created the
format in the first place.

> [1] The criticism applies more to the FOP (XML) path than the
> jade (SGML) path, though; I've had big issues with FOP, in part
> because Java isn't well-supported in Debian.  You also get to
> try to write code entirely in XML if you want to use a
> non-default stylesheet, which is a big pain.  The upside (if
> you're an SGML junkie) is that the documentation for XSLT is at
> least readily available from the W3C Web site, and while DSSSL
> uses Scheme, the specification is hard to find and hard to
> read.  The last time I needed to do this sort of thing, I used
> LaTeX and the prosper package for slides.