Subject: Re: Update to documentation
From: sam th (sam@uchicago.edu)
Date: Mon Oct 23 2000 - 15:43:16 CDT
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On Mon, 23 Oct 2000, Karl Ove Hufthammer wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "sam th" <sam@uchicago.edu>
> To: "Ashleigh Gordon" <agordon@bigpond.net.au>
> Cc: "Abiword Developer List" <abiword-dev@abisource.com>
> Sent: Monday, October 23, 2000 10:15 AM
> Subject: Re: Update to documentation
>
>
> > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> > Committed. Your XML work sounds quite cool. How are you planning to
> > generate PDF files? The way I would immediately think would be XML
> > source-> XSL-FO stylesheet -> PDF/TeX. What's your plan?
>
> We will use XML --> XSLT (not FO) --> LaTeX --> PDF.
>
> I don't know much about XSL-FO, and this seems much simpler and easier.
First question - how do you do the transform from XML to LaTeX with
XSL/T? I didn't know of any such stylesheets.
Second, the crash course in XSL-FO (not that I actually know anything
about them):
Back when the W3C decided to create a big stylesheet initiative
for XML (called XSL) the plan was for it to contain both a transformation
language and a page layout language. The idea was that the transformation
language would be used to transform other XML documents in to documents in
the page layout language (also and XML applicaiton). However, it turned
out that the page layout stuff was really hard. And that people wanted
the transformation stuff for much more. So the W3C split the XSL project
into two areas, one that created the XSLT and XPath reccomendations (this
area consisted mostly of James Clark, the author of expat, and basically
the creator of XSLT) and one that continues to be working on the page
layout language (I said it was hard, right?). That page layout language
is now called XSL-FO (formatting objects). They provide lots and lots of
typesetting and formatting power (more than CSS). In terms of formatting
power available, I would describe them as follows
80% CSS
95% XSL-FO
98% TeX
100% Actual programming
AbiWord comes in substantially below CSS. PDF and PS represent the facts
after the rendering happen, and so are not part of this
hierarchy. (Writing PS in emacs will get you 100% power, and 110%
insanity.)
The XSL-FO spec is still in progress (it's still a working draft
[1]). There are few good tutorials in the use of FOs, but one good one
can be found here [2].
That was a little longer than I planned, but I hope it helps. And I do
plan to add XSL-FO export to AbiWord some day.
[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/xsl/
[2] http://www.ibiblio.org/xml/books/bible/updates/15.html
sam th
sam@uchicago.edu
http://www.abisource.com/~sam/
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