(CC-ing to general@ as it’s the place where I believe the conversation
should take place.)
I too would be in favour of welcoming DITA-OT as a sub-project of XML
Graphics. I think it matches rather well the purpose of this project.
A few comments:
On 27/03/14 18:32, Ron Wheeler wrote:
I think that you are right about being a sister project to FOP within
XMLGraphics.
The discussion from everyone has been very helpful even if the writer was
negative to the idea.
//I would be happy to see some interaction in a number of areas.
a) Clearly, the DITA group should be pushing for the FOP features that are
required to produce the documents that can be described in DITA.
Pushing for having some features implemented is one thing; actually
implementing them is another. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t
believe the skill sets of a DITA developer and a FOP developer
intersect, do they?
So IIUC the goal of this would be to attract sponsors who use the
DITA-OT to fund specific developments? Or are DITA developers willing to
learn what is necessary to contribute new features to FOP?
b)I think that the current Apache members could make positive suggestions
about the processing and structure of the DITA toolkit.
Again, because of the different skill sets you might have put your hopes
a bit high I’m afraid.
c) The DITA language specification is constantly undergoing updates and there
are likely things that current FOP users could suggest as additions to allow
them to use a standard language to author documents.
FWIW you might want to become involved in the W3C Print ang Page Layout
Community Group:
http://www.w3.org/community/ppl/
d) The users of the DITA tool kit need some customization of FOP
configuration to produce nice looking documents and there is likely a lot of
experts here that could be engaged to do these projects.
We can certainly increase the collaboration between the two projects,
although I don’t think becoming part of XML Graphics is a requirement
for that. Just out of curiosity, what are your reasons for wanting to
become part of Apache?
Thanks,
Vincent
Ron
On 27/03/2014 12:18 PM, Chris Bowditch wrote:
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
