About a week ago I posted an email asking if FOP could handle a document (acually a thesis) of about 80 pages with a toc and a table containing 100 images at the end.
My XSLT stylesheets right now convert the XML document into ConTeXt, a version of TeX. I had planned to go ahead and change my stylesheets to see if FOP could handle a somewhat larger document. However, in the meantime, my girlfriend has informed me that the thesis will contain around 60 orignial images, totalling as much as 450 Megabytes alone! At first I told her I didn't know of any application, even the commercial and professional ones like Page Maker, that could handle 450 Megs at once. We had a little dispute over it. I checked on line to see what the limitations were for commercial applications such as Page Maker as well as non-commercial applications such as TeX. I soon realized that Page Maker has a feature that lets you work on different parts of a large document and then assemble them into a book. Likewise, LaTeX has an \input command that presumably works on only one part of the document at once. I'm still not sure if TeX could handle such a large document. I will have to see. But what would be the size limitations for FOP? I'm not trying to be unreasonable. I think such a large document is insane, but then again, it does represent a real-life situaion. The graphics are so large because they were scanned in from older pictures. I suppose that if FOP handled just one page at a time (wrote it to disc somehow), it wouldn't matter how large the document was. This problem is one mostly of curiosity, since I don't think I'm going to try FOP with such a large document. However, I got out my LaTeX book and started looking up how to do basic things like use unicode and positioned page numbers and suddenly remembered why I hate TeX so much. One has to import special packages and use multiple workarounds just to create non-justified text. Which made me really grateful for FOP and hopeful that it can continue to evolve to the point that it makes TeX obsolete. (As a side note, I find it really disappointing that so many tech-type people adhere to TeX and don't consider FO solutions. If even 1/10th of the energy spent on TeX went to FOP, we would have 200 developers on the FOP team and version 9.0.) Paul -- ************************ *Paul Tremblay * [EMAIL PROTECTED] * ************************ --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
