On 31.05.2008 08:14:11 Martin Edge wrote: > Hey Guys, > > Got a question - this may or may not be the best place to ask it. > > What's the best file format for production printing?
Depends in which part of the world you are in. Australia seems to be PCL land. Europe is often PostScript land. And the US are often AFP land. It always depends on a number of factors. I like PostScript best and have a distaste against PCL. Others prefer other formats. > My XSLT/XML/XSL-FO conversion process takes about an hour, but conversion to > PCL takes near on 12hrs (or more) and Postscript is looking very similar > with an astronomical file size. You need to take into account that XSL-FO is a rather complex and versatile document format which takes its toll on processing effort. The actual rendering to the target format is rather fast and somewhat comparable for all supported output formats (except the bitmap formats which are slower). The big effort is spent with the actual layout which is the same for all output formats. > Is there an efficient file format available that is much faster, and still > allows me to control duplexing and tray selection per page? Probably not as I think the major factor is XSL-FO, not the output format. Personally, I like using XSL-FO for large volume output but you have to know that the process is CPU-intensive because it's so versatile and can be used in so many different use-cases (business-style documents, books, manuals etc. etc.). Optimize your stylesheets and think about parallelizing the processing! I've built systems with rather satisfying performance figures with FOP in the past, but only by making use of multiple CPUs/cores. You can of course switch to one of the commercial, proprietary output management solutions. They are usually faster but you leave the area of open standards at least what the input format concerns. > Is there another forum anyone knows of that would be best to address this > issue? > > Thanks > Martin. Jeremias Maerki --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
