The main issue for me is that, to my knowledge, there is no open source
solution that works with CSS Paged media and its associated generated
content) and none of the available commercial solutions is cheap.  Prince
XML allows you to do development without a license but not commercial use.
Whether good or bad there are several FO processors in the open source
market.

There is also an issue of extensions. I'm not totally against doing this
for Docbook but you then have to choose how will you implement those
instructions without cluttering your CSS with prefixed selectors. It's not
like FO where you can code the extensions as separate packages and then use
a parameter to reference the extensions. I guess you could create separate
stylesheets for Antenna House, Prince XML and other CSS PM processors but
then it becomes a maintainability issue.

The final question I'd have before jumping into CSS Paged Media development
is for what version of the stylesheets? The current version still has some
ugly kludges inherited from the distant past but it's what we have. XSLT2
stylesheets have not made it to the main stylesheet distribution yet.

All that said, there's  nothing stopping you from porting your css
stylesheets to the XSLT1 packkage and submitting them for inlusion, whether
they are accepted or not I can't predict.


On Fri, Aug 14, 2015 at 1:38 PM, Winslow Dalpe <[email protected]> wrote:

> I have a little experience in this arena with my latest project. A great
> resource I found for things like dynamic page numbers and other features
> was this article
>
> http://alistapart.com/article/building-books-with-css3
>
> In it they actually discuss the table of contents issue you mention.
>
> For reference, if you want to see what I personally have done with it so
> far, you can take a look at the html output at
> http://rwdalpe.github.io/two-graves/player-guide/
>
> There's a link to the PDF output at the top of the page.
>
> Princexml is the tool I have been using to convert html+css into PDF.
>
> So far I have found this preferable to xsl-fo and haven't encountered a
> killer missing feature yet.
> On 8/9/15 4:45 PM, Jan Tosovsky wrote:
> > Dear All,
> >
> > (1) there was lot of work in W3 recently dedicated in CSS for paged media
> > (2) there are conversion tools from HTML+CSS to PDF utilizing these
> features
> > (3) some interesting JavaScript libraries have appeared (e.g.
> > vivliostyle.js) emulating the intended rendering to 'yet inmature'
> browsers
> > (polyfills)
> >
> > which make me wonder if there is an interest in making some kind of
> > reference implementation of PDF-like output in HTML+CSS from DocBook
> source,
> > especially for (3). Has anybody any experience with it?
>
> There were some mumblings a while ago that this might be the direction
> of print output, seeing that XSL-FO doesn't have much activity anymore.
>  So more investigation is surely welcome.
>
> I played with this a while ago, and while you can get pretty good
> looking "print" output with fairly little effort, there are some obvious
> functionality gaps, such as: How do you produce a table of contents with
> page numbers?
>
>
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