On 2/27/2013 2:12 PM, Ed Nodland wrote:
I am curious if the high cost of XSL-FO development is due to FO being
more difficult then basic XSLT. We program many XSLTs, some are complex
that merge data from multiple XML files that contain coded data in
tables, tables of descriptions of the coded data, header data, etc.
XSLT becomes a powerful programming language for text processing if it
is written recursively like the old LISP language. I agree this can be
daunting, but maybe I could eat FO for breakfast. I'll have to looking
to it further when due dates don't get in my way.
DISCLAIMER: I work for WebWorks.
I believe there are 3 challenges to XSL-FO in general. Folks should be
able to have success with it, but for three things:
1. XSL-FO is complex. It has more options and flags than you
can shake a stick at. Now, there is a reason for all that
complexity. It gives you the ability to format at the level
you would find in FrameMaker or TeX/LaTeX for printing.
That's if you have a solid XSL-FO processor. Commercial
products are quite good and Apache is moving their FOP
processor forward in the 1.1 version.
2. Lack of a UI to configure basic options. Well, this is what
our product ePublisher provides for Frame, Word, and DITA
sourced content. Much easier to make adjustments there
rather than digging down into XSL-FO markup and XSL to
make a routine change.
3. Lack of maintainable starting points. The DITA-OT provided
an initial PDF option in the 1.2-1.4 releases. It was
not well designed for extension. This was improved in the
DITA-OT 1.5 and later release. Even so, there are challenges
to maintaining different publishing profiles.
ePublisher provides a baseline conversion and a proven method
to help customer upgrade between releases and maintain minimal
code changes (if code changes are necessary). Further, ePublisher
provides starting points for page templates which can be
customized to make it easier to get what you want without
XSL.
Folks are working on these problems. Progress is being made. Yet do
keep in mind that XSL-FO is a very ambitious specification.
Ben Allums
[email protected]
512-381-8885
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