Douglas Kojetin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > my question is, what do i need (on the webserver end) to produce the > single page HTML, multi page HTML and PDF documents?
A lot of people still use various DSSSL style sheets that have been around for quite a while---most of the references people have made so far are for various flavors of those. They're pretty stable, in both the good and bad senses of that term; that is, they perform well, and generally give good output, but DSSSL is thought, in many (but not all) quarters, to be a dead issue. Another alternative, and the one I use (and have used for two or three years of developing docs using Docbook now), is the Docbook xslt stylesheet collection (http://sourceforge.net/projects/docbook), along with xsltproc (for HTML output) and passivetex (for PDF output). This solution is not, at least for PDF output, quite as mature as the DSSSL solution---though the HTML output is good, and has lots of hooks for tweaking the output---but it is fast for HTMl output, and there is an approaching critical mass of tools that work using this method of doing the formatting that will, I think, soon kill DSSSL once and for all. For instance, conglomerate (http://www.conglomerate.org/index.php), which is shaping up to be a good, fast XML editor is starting to incorporate support for xmlroff (http://xmlroff.sourceforge.net/), which is a good, fast (not-yet-complete) xml-fo to print/pdf engine, which means Linux users should soon have a good structured XML editor which can render directly to PDF...but only using the XSL stylesheets, not DSSSL. Let anyone misinterpret---I don't have anything against DSSSL; in fact, I suspect I would actually prefer its listp/scheme-based syntax to the XML syntax of XSL (I have written a fairly complete Dia UML diagram to SQL DDL stylesheet, and would have really appreciated the fingernail clippings of DSSSL to the sheer verbosity of XSL). But DSSSL has been pretty much disavowed by its creators, and, IMHO, only has users at all because at the moment it represents the best docbook to pdf solution on free OSes. Mike -- In the fields a body's burning, as the war machine keeps turning -- Black Sabbath -- TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug TriLUG Organizational FAQ : http://trilug.org/faq/ TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/ TriLUG PGP Keyring : http://trilug.org/~chrish/trilug.asc
