On Tue, 2 Aug 2011, Lex Trotman wrote:
On 1 August 2011 22:42, Dag Wieers <[email protected]> wrote:
Only recently looking into FOP for creating PDF output that is highly
customized (eg. corporate identity) I am feeling disappointed in (the
expectations that I had in) FOP.
Either because I do not find any useful examples, or because most of what I
do find is very complicated, while we are basically only interested in
changing styles, adding a header/footers, cover-page or an index.
I presume that you have re-read the references from FAQ #2. That
answers any questions that I have ever had and certainly covers most
of the things you mention above. But of course you have to learn
XSL-FO.
Right, the biggest problem I have is with XSLT/XSL-FO and the lack of
proper examples where you have the input, the files and the output. So you
can tweak to your own liking without messing about too much.
My own toolchain (using docbook2odf and unoconv) is in many ways easier for
end-users to customize than FOP or dblatex, because it is a matter of
tweaking styles in OpenOffice and using that template during conversion,
even when docbook2odf is less complete as an implementation (docbook2odf
certainly is missing basic functionality and integration with specific
docbook constructs).
Allowing interactive styling is a nice idea, but only if whatever is
done interactively does not have to be re-done each time the document
is converted.
That's why unoconv does allow to convert from ODT to other formats while
applying a previously create stylesheet. The workflow is simple, first
convert to ODT (using docbook2odf), format by changing the
styles/headers/... in OpenOffice to your liking. Save this as a template
and use the styles from the template in future conversions. All your
output documents (whether that's PDF, ODT, DOC, ...) will look exactly how
you styled it.
It's true docbook2odf is uncomplete at this point.
Does anyone known of any good examples for creating nice customized PDF
output using FOP ? Or can we create some momentum in improving docbook2odf
to have an alternative toolchain for PDF (and other formats) output.
My totally non-scientific survey of the examples on the asciidoc
homepage indicates that:
1. PDFs are mostly corporate users
2. they don't specify the toolchain or acknowledge asciidoc
So I think it is possible that there are many unacknowledged examples
out there that we don't know about and who are not going to release
you their configuration.
Like how O'Reilly has a large modified set of tweaks that's private ?
Your initial comment is that you are only new to FOP and its
configuration. Instead of giving up quickly and committing to the
open ended effort involved in generating another toolchain I would
council you to first spend some reasonable effort learning how to
configure FOP (or to be exact the XSLT stage that generates the XSL-FO
that FOP renders). See again FAQ #2.
I don't see how me struggling with FOP will help others. I don't want the
styling to be done by people that have XSLT skills, instead they should be
able to do the same thing without any specific skills, other than styling
a document and use that as a template for future documents.
I was hoping FOP/XSL-FO was a lot more simple, but it looks as if it
provides too many options (or rather allows complete programming XSLT
syntax). I am not the person to inflict this on others ;-)
--
-- dag wieers, [email protected], http://dag.wieers.com/
-- dagit linux solutions, [email protected], http://dagit.net/
[Any errors in spelling, tact or fact are transmission errors]
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"asciidoc" group.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
[email protected].
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/asciidoc?hl=en.
