On 2014-03-26 Ron Wheeler wrote: > On 26/03/2014 2:59 PM, Jan Tosovsky wrote: > > On 2014-03-26 Christopher R. Maden wrote: > >> Although I don’t get a vote, I completely agree with Glenn that DITA > >> integration into FOP is completely inappropriate. > > +1 > > > > FOP consumes standardized XSL-FO. > > > > DITA-OT should produce standardized XSL-FO. Period ;-) > > It does but FOP does not support all PDF features so some of the things > that people can express in DITA's XML can not produce the PDF output > that people want/need. >
There are two possible interpretations: (1) user's intent cannot be achieved by XSL-FO (2) user's intent can be achieved by XSL-FO, but the given functionality is not supported by FOP Anyway, it would be nice to collect these requests (wish list) and create a poll targetting DITA community to get real demand for them. If there is something FOP related, FOP devs could roughly estimate mandays (and thereof costs). The final part is to find sponsors or involve crowdfunding. But keep in mind that XSL-FO is loosing its attraction. Its standardization has been discontinued and no one can expect new features in the near future. I strongly suggest joining already mentioned W3C PPL group http://www.w3.org/community/ppl/ which is trying to move these things forward. Standardization has moved primarily into the CSS. There are many proposals trying to enhance this standard with paged media related stuff. It is clear that this is considered as the future. Check also this article: http://alistapart.com/article/building-books-with-css3 I personally think it would be much easier to attract developers to create a completely new paged media CSS engine than to add several niche XSL-FO features into FOP. But when mentioning the new engine, I don't think it is a good idea. Sooner or later these CSS features will be adopted by major browsers and in that time it won't be necessary to produce PDFs at all :-) PDF engines (XSL-FO, CSS) will survive only if they offer any added value. I can think of an export into other formats (PS, AFP), a sophisticated index rendering (XSL-FO 1.1) or microtypography features http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microtypography (not covered by standards yet). But AFAIK the latter would require major FOP redesign... Jan
