Hi Ron,
Thanks for your e-mail. I can certainly see why joining the 2
communities seems like a good idea to help improve funding for FOP, and
deliver the features DITA requires. I'd certainly be interested in
seeing what the list of missing XSL-FO features are from a DITA perspective.
The challenge with joining multiple communities together is that it
makes the merged project too complex and it scares users/developers
away. This is a problem faced by FOP already. The codebase is so vast
and complex, many people struggle to get to grips with it.
I would be against DITA and FOP merging for this reason, plus the
separation of concerns already stated by others. That said, if DITA
wanted to join Apache, adding DITA as a sub project of XMLGraphics would
seem like a logical place for the DITA community. That way there would
be some links between the 2 projects and an oversight of both from a
common committee. This should help to improve interoperability a little
although perhaps not to the extent you had hoped for.
Thanks,
Chris
On 26/03/2014 14:42, Ron Wheeler wrote:
The DITA-OT (DITA Open Toolkit) (http://www.ditaopentoolkit.org/) is
an open source project that depends on FOP.
It takes DITA
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_Information_Typing_Architecture)
XML input and produces a number of different document types.
One of the main output types is PDF and it uses FOP to do this. It
takes DITA input (xml) and produces an intermediate set of files that
are processed by FOP to produce a PDF. It can also produce HTML
There is a Maven plug-in to control the production in an IDE
environment. It calls all the bits and pieces required to take the raw
DITA XML files and output a document in PDF in the target folder.
There is some interest in adding DITA-OT to the Apache family and in
my opinion, the XMLGraphics group seems like a natural home and the
FOP sub-project might be a good place for DITA-OT to reside.
DITA-OT is a large community of users but a small community of
developers.
There are also a few enhancement ideas that would require FOP
enhancements to complete.
In addition, my own belief is that the FOP community could add some
technical advice to the DITA-OT community that would be helpful.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/dita-ot/ is the download page. DITA-OT
is currently distributed under the Apache License V2.0.
I am not one of the main players in the group but have taken on the
task of seeing if there is a possibility of opening the discussion
with the FOP group.
Would there be any interest in considering adding front-end XML
processing to the FOP production project?
Ron
