I think I've discussed this problem here before, and I'm not precisely
sure what should be done about it, but:
- FOP currently doesn't scale up well to handling large documents
- This is acknowledged by the FOP developers; according to their
site they are working on a rewrite projected to be done by the 2nd
half of this year (I have no particular confidence in the accuracy
of that prediction).
- FOP is a Java program (eeeww).
- LaTeX is great for large documents, and does formatting beautifully!
- LaTeX has no native Unicode support
- The Unicode package that exists for LaTeX works great in my
experience, but requires some LaTeX knowledge to install and, more
importantly,
- It is no longer being maintained
(http://www.unruh.de/DniQ/latex/unicode/)
- There is OMEGA (http://omega.enstb.org/index.html%3Cintro:on%3E),
though I am unsure how complete it is, and the fact that they
trumpet their use of 16-bit character representation is not
encouraging.
- LaTeX has some other obscure limitations, like the inability to
compute table column widths based on the contents of the cells
There are, to my knowledge, no other viable and *free* routes to the
creation of complex PDF documents (and I've done a lot of research, so
before you say "what about XXXX", check it out thoroughly). The main
obstacle, of course, is the lack of a good layout engine.
Thoughts?
--
Dave Abrahams
Boost Consulting
www.boost-consulting.com
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