Hi Ed I'm not sure whether the DITA community is leaning towards XSL-FO. Yes, oXygen XML Author/Editor is an excellent DITA editor, but I fully agree with Scott: XSL-FO is complicated and expensive. The main reason why people TRY to use XSL-FO to generate PDFs from DITA-sourced content is because the FREE DITA Open Toolkit uses XSL-FO (with FREE FOP). Indeed, the DITA-OT is *FREE* (that's what people see), but it serves as a REFERENCE IMPLEMENTATION (and that's people often don't see). This means that the DITA-OT is a starting point; it is not a ready-to-use product which gives you high-quality output "out of the box".
Developing XSL-FO stylesheets means... development work, and this is where "free" becomes expensive. A single XSL-FO stylesheet for a publication can easily cost $10,000, exclusive of translations, modifications etc. Also, keep in mind that multiple stylesheets may be required for a single "publication", for example: - A stylesheet for the table of contents - A stylesheet for the preface - A stylesheet for the parts or chapters in a book - A stylesheet for an appendix - A style for an index These can easily be created (and updated) with FrameMaker+DITA-FMx. Here are some examples of PDFs generated from DITA-sourced content: - Generated by our customer, using XSL-FO (FOP): http://help.esko.com/docs/en-us/suite-general/12/installationguide/Engines_12_InstallationGuide_EN.pdf - Generated by ourselves using DITA-FMx: http://www.adit.ws/nomadesk/help/help-manual.pdf If you want to see how the PDFs are generated with DITA-FMx, check out these screencasts on YouTube: http://goo.gl/BevKm Finally, apart from XSL-FO and FrameMaker, you could also use DITA2Go to generate PDFs from DITA-sourced content (via Word): www.dita2go.com Cheers -- Yves Barbion www.scripto.nu
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