phillip rhodes wrote: > I want to know if anyone has used PassiveTEX and switched to FOP? Or gone > the other way? I would like to know what brought you to FOP, or > turned you > to PassiveTEX.
I'm going to take a stab at addressing your question. I do not fit into either category you mention, but did strongly consider using the TeX family of products when we decided to move away from FrameMaker about a year ago. > FOP is wonderful, and I am not disbaraging it whatsoever. > But as a small component in a much larger project, I can't be > concerned with > trying to debug a problem with my documents. Since we were looking for a long-term solution, we are able to live with the frustrations of problems with the various pieces of technology. It sounds like you are in a different category. > I want it to work as > advertised. I think it is advertised as version 0.20.5x, which means that it is experimental, not ready even to be called 1.0 yet. (I understand what you mean, but some might construe your statement above to mean that the FOP developers have misrepresented FOP, and I don't want that to go unchallenged. If you have specific things that need to clarified in the doc, please feel free to post them to this list & we'll work on getting them cleaned up.) > I realize that FOP is relatively immature in terms of > developement, whereas latex and other programs have been around for a very > long time. You are correct. The TeX stuff is much more mature. Here are some other pros and cons to consider: 1. My understanding is that there is a steep learning curve with TeX stuff, and that it is difficult to install and configure. 2. With TeX you are working directly with formatting information mixed with your semantic document. The beauty of XML is that those things can be separated, which is very important in a world where multi-purposing is becoming the norm. 3. I think the best of TeX will find its way into FOP. 4. There are at least 3 commercial and 2 open source implementations of XSL-FO, which means that your investment in the infrastructure of XSL-FO itself is pretty safe. Adopting the infrastructure or platform is by far the biggest cost of implementing either XSL-FO or TeX. After considering the above, I decided that I didn't want to invest a bunch in TeX, then switch to another platform (presumably FOP) down the road. It made more sense to me to take that time and try to make FOP better faster. Since you need a mature solution now, your constraints are different. One other thing to consider -- since installing FOP is relatively easy & cost-free, be sure to at least try it to see if it meets your requirements (it sounds like you might already have done this). It works pretty well for a lot of cases. With good control of managing releases on your end, it might be just as good as TeX for your case. HTH. Victor Mote --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
