Re: XSL-FO Engine comparisons
Hi, I am now working on reporting tool which outputs reports into XSL FO, so I have some experinece with tools described here. Althoug we are using only quite simple formatting I would like to say something to this topic as well. On 31 Jul 2001, at 9:24 Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote about XSL-FO Engine comparisons : FOP FOP was the first XSL-FO engine and is certainly the most popular. It's open source and far easier to install than PassiveTeX, the other open source alternative. However, of the ones I was able to actually test it produced by far the worst output. It had the most annoying formatting troubles. For example, it ate all the blank lines in my source code I have to agree that FOP is worst I have used, but is improving rapidly. In version 0.17, which was recent in the time I started to follow developement it was practicaly unusable due to lack of international support. Now I am quite satisfied, in basics FOP fullfills our needs although some workarounds are still needed. examples and put extra indentation at the front of the first line of each example. I've noticed that probably more than half of the bug reports on the Docbook-APPS mailing list about the Docbook XSL-FO stylesheets can actually be attributed to bugs in FOP. FOP is improving rapidly -- one major bug I noted in footnote handling was fixed in the last couple of weeks while I was performing my tests -- but it's clearly not even an alpha quality release yet. A lot of work needs to be done before FOP can be recommended for more than experimentation. XEP I was unable to get XEP to run. It was totally non-functional, and did not produce any output. I know some other people have gotten it to run -- the PDF version of the XSL specification was produced with XEP. However, it simply did not work for me at all. However good the XEP engine may be at converting XSL-FO documents to PDF, its horrible user interface and incomprehensible installation procedure eliminated it from my consideration. I am using evaluation version of XEP with success. It is far better than FOP. It has strange behavior on repeating table headers and it doesn't support collapsing border model on tables. Instalation i quite easy, version 2.50 has even installer which configures BAT file for you. There is one issue - JAXP MUST NOT be installed as JAVA extension - In that case XEP fails with Class not found exception. PassiveTeX As I had some experience with TeX that suggested that TeX is I nightmare I even didn't try It. :-)) Antenna House XSL Formatter The Antenna House XSL Formatter produced very attractive output, on a par with that generated by PassiveTeX and much better than FOP's. I noticed no major flaws or cosmetic bugs. Antenna House also claims they're the only formatter able to handle mixed writing-modes such as "tb-rl" for Chinese/Japanese/Korean, though I didn't test that. I have to agree that Antenna is best I have seen Most importantly, Antenna House had by far the easiest installation and the nicest user interface of all the formatters tested. More work is still needed, but at least I could conceive of giving this formatter to a non-programmer end-user. The others all have effectively non-existent user interfaces, and horrible installation procedures. The Antenna house I think that lack of user interface is not bug but feature, FOP and XEP are renderers intended for usage in application servers and servlets. Software that will provide environment for creating and rendering FO documnets via services like FOP and XEP must be created. Problems with instalation and similar things are common feature of really portable and OS independent Java software. formatter was the only one of the four that took me less than an hour from download to first use. The downside to this otherwise excellent engine is that it's Windows only and based on Windows graphics primitives rather than PostScript or PDF. It displays on the screen very nicely, and prints nicely too. However, it does not produce a PDF document that I can send to my editor or a typesetter. Bottom line: none of the formatters are yet suitable for producing a finished product. one of them can replace TeX or QuarkXPress. You might I think there is other reason for formatters beeing not production redy as well. This reason is that XSL FO is only in CR state of its first version. I think 1.1 or 2.0 XSL FO Recomendation will be far better. be able to publish a simple book with these, but you'd have to design your book and style sheet so that you avoided the bugs and unimplemented features of the processor. Antenna House probably produces the most polished output, and I'd use it if all I wanted to do was print out a document from my laser printer. However, since I need PDF files I can send to my editors and download to a typesetter, my choice for the time being is PassiveTeX. -- pa
Re: Keep-together (and the other keep-*'s)
Im XSL FO spec in article 6.7.9 fo:table-row keep-together, keep-with- previous and keep-with-next properties are listed in The following properties apply to this formatting object:. So why is keep-together on table-row considered against spec? pa On 17 Jul 2001, at 9:36 Alex McLintock wrote about Re: Keep-together (and the other ke : --- Struan Judd [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: If so might I request a small departure from the XSL:FO spec, if it is straight-forward to implement. Please allow keep-together on fo:table-row. I don't think deviations from the XSL:FO spec are either wise or going to be popular. - To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: different Fonts in Same Line.
this should be done via fo:wrapper, but this is broken inf FOP, So try using fo:inline pa On 16 Jul 2001, at 1:28 rajeev nair wrote about different Fonts in Same Line. : hello, I want to add 2-3 different fonts in same fo:block. means in a paragraph there is serif,Richa,Arial in same line. If i use fo:block it will be in different lines. I tried with fo:inline-sequence.but was in vain. can anyone help me? regards rajiv - To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: fonts
Yes, fonts are stored in PDF file so it is bigger. But there is no other way how to display glyphs which are not included in standard fonts supplied with acrobat reader. pa On 25 Jul 2001, at 14:50 Hoang Nam wrote about Re: fonts : Hello, When you use the fonts embbedded ( with metric files), do you increase the size of the file , don't you ? Nam - Original Message - From: rajeev nair [EMAIL PROTECTED] hello why don't u make ur own font metric xml file for arial? You can make it from ttf files easily by using the class TTFReader in fop. regards rajiv --- Wolf Gustavo (SGC-EXT) [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi all, has someone implemmented Arial and Arial-italics? If the answer is yes, could I get the corresponding files? Also, does Helvetica (what I am replacing Arial with) have italics? Thanks once more, Gustavo - To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
problems with rowspans
Hi all, in my project I am using tables with rowspans, something like this : fo:table fo:table-column column-width=40mm/ fo:table-column column-width=40mm/ fo:table-column column-width=40mm/ fo:table-column column-width=40mm/ fo:table-body fo:table-row fo:table-cell fo:blockgood/fo:block/fo:table-cell fo:table-cell fo:blockbad/fo:block/fo:table-cell fo:table-cell fo:blockugly/fo:block/fo:table-cell fo:table-cell fo:blockugly/fo:block/fo:table-cell /fo:table-row fo:table-row fo:table-cell fo:blocknice/fo:block/fo:table-cell fo:table-cell number-columns-spanned=2 number-rows-spanned=2 fo:blockdice/fo:block /fo:table-cell fo:table-cell fo:blockvice/fo:block/fo:table-cell /fo:table-row fo:table-row fo:table-cell fo:blockliterature/fo:block/fo:table-cell fo:table-cell fo:blockart/fo:block/fo:table-cell /fo:table-row fo:table-row fo:table-cell fo:blockjava/fo:block/fo:table-cell fo:table-cell fo:blockmusic/fo:block/fo:table-cell fo:table-cell fo:blockperl/fo:block/fo:table-cell fo:table-cell fo:blockpython/fo:block/fo:table-cell /fo:table-row /fo:table-body /fo:table As you can see third row contains only two cells because place for other two is covered by spanning cell from previous row. My problem is that FOP on this line says WARNING: Number of cell columns under table- row not equal to number of table-columns and completely DISCARDS this row, so some content is not rendered and is conpletely lost. I understand that implementation of rowspans is more difficult than colspans. But loss of data is absolutely unacceptable. Would it be possible not to discard rows which have less cells than count of table- columns and render them for example as if they had empty cells at the end of row to match required number of table-cells. Rendered this way the will not look as it shoul but at least no data will be lost. Petr Andrs - To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Printing PDF using FOP...
That is interesting, but how can I print with displaying print dialog. In my java program I need to to print PDF generated by fop. I need to have print dialog displayed and I need acrobat to close automatically after printing. I tried acread32.exe /p pdffile, which dispalys print dialog but arcorbat reader stays open after printing. pa On 15 Jun 2001, at 9:37 Maurice Rice wrote about Re: Printing PDF using FOP... : You can use the Acrobat reader to send a pdf file directly to your printer. Try building a command string using the information at http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=fop-devm=9865403484w=2. Execute the command using Runtime.exec(). - Original Message - From: Hitesh Bagchi [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, June 15, 2001 7:13 AM Subject: Re: Printing PDF using FOP... I downloaded a fresh set of code from the fop cvs and did find the PCLRenderer and the other latest source code. But as far I could make out PCLRenderer does not print to a printer instead it prints to a file in pcl format. Now in case of pcl as well I do have to send the output to the printer. So my previous problem remains. I am actually not getting how can I send the output to the printer. I think if somebody can provide with a code fragment then it would be of great help. Thanks, Hitesh - To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] - To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FOP page definition
This is known bug in 0.18.1 which is fixed in current CVS version so get current CVS. pa On 1 Jun 2001, at 9:13 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote about FOP page definition : Hi, Could you help me, I still have problem with the pagination of the document. I have to generate a PDF file starting from a XML document. First I generate the FO file and then I use the DRIVER of the FOP apps package. I use the same page definition for all pages; I need a region-before of 7cm and a region-after of 3.5cm fo:simple-page-master master-name=first page-width=21cm page-height=29.7cm margin-top=0.5cm margin-bottom=0.5cm margin-left=0.8cm margin-right=0.8cm fo:region-body margin-top=7cm margin-bottom=3.5cm/ fo:region-before extent=7cm/ fo:region-after extent=3.5cm/ /fo:simple-page-master The problem is that the top margin works well, but the bottom margin is wrong! The page breaks at ~9cm from the bottom. I use the last version of FOP (Fop-0.18.1-DEV) and my pages have only tables, different column width and different borders. I have the impression that the calculation have problem, could be possible? I have another remarks: on the header I use a table, the cell of this table have another internal table definition with different number of rows. When I define the region-before by 7cm, the PDF could not include all the information, some rows are printed on the next page (the used space is less then 7cm); If I extend the region by 10cm, all the information are printed correctly and the effective height is less then 7cm again. here the two exemple: prova7cm.pdf prova10cm.pdf Maybe I miss some definition, which one? For your information, if I use the same *.fo file with the demo version of XEP - Renderx the pagination is correct! Thanks Bye Stefano Stefano Bianda Dipl. El. Ing. ETHZ Analista programmatore La Posta Svizzera Information Technology Services 161 Advanced Project Engineering Viale Stazione 15 Casella postale 2749 CH-6501 Bellinzona Tel. +41 (0)91 807 69 24 Fax +41 (0)91 807 69 25 E-Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] - To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
