On Wed, May 31, 2006 at 04:17:26PM -0300, Stefan Ziel wrote:
>hi folks,
>
>creating an Output Handler for OASIS OpenDocument, as mentioned in the
>"wish list" don?t seem to make much sense, as XSL:FO can easily be
>converted to OpenDocument using a XSLT style sheet. without doing all
>that rendering in between ;)
I did some steps in this direction last autumn because it looks
temptingly easy. There where some parts of the opendocument
format that make it easy (in comparision with the original
openoffice format).
For example a "flat xml" format is defined: it is not necessary
to split style and content (and some other parts - i dont
remember exactly) into different files - you can put all into one
uncompressed xml file absolutly unordered.
But the more i come to details the more the problems araised (at
least for my limited but not unexisting xslt
knowledge).
Inheriance - as also mentionted by jeremias - was one
showstopper.
Another was that openoffice had not realy better possibilities to
handle autoformating (detecting column width) tables which was
one goal of my tests to bypass limitations of fop.
My conclusion at this time was, that is is "more or less" easy to
convert to opendocument from an arbitrary (self defined) to
opendocument format, but "more or less" impossible to convert
xml-fo to opendocument. This means that i have to maintain two
xslt sets, but my intention was to have one toolchain like:
[my-xml] + [my-xslt-templates] --> [xml-fo] and then
[xml-fo] + [xslt-tmplates | prog-like-fop | ooo-importfilter] --> opendocument
so that i have to write (or better others have written ;-)) the
conversation from one standard format (xsl-fo) to another
standard format (opendocument format) only once.
As written above i see three possibilities:
a) a common developed set of xslt templates
(i failed to go far this route - maybe others have more success)
b) opendocument format as output format of fop
(i think it would be the most probable way - having the
experience of rtf-output in mind)
c) a importfilter in openoffice that can read xsl-fo files
(though not impossible i dont remember any thinking of the
ooo-developers for such a feature)
If there are leaders for implementing b) to fop i would try to
contribute - beeing cautious to dont prommise more than i could
deliver.
gerhard
--
.''`. gerhard oettl on Debian/Gnu Linux
: :' :
`. `'` gpg key: 1024D/D59131AA 2002-06-18
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