Zack Brown wrote:
So, to sum up your argument, PostScript does give more power, but XSL-FO makes
some things (footnotes, page number alignment, etc) easy, that PostScript
has no basic provisions for?
Yes. PS is, in general lower level than XSLFO, you can position
individual strings and graphic elements (=more power), but it lacks
higher abstractions (margins, indentations, borders, justification,
alignment, floats, page numbering, hyphenation and some more)
...but I wonder if there are any PostScript subroutine libraries out
there that try to bridge that gap. A quick google search didn't find
any.
No surprise. Just try a "Hello world" yourself...
inherited from CSS (the most notable immediate predecessor).
I think TeX came before CSS. That's what I used in the early/mid 90's. It
was really great, but very rigid in ways that seemed arbitrary (like not
using memory that was available on the system, even when the alternative
was to terminate without completing its task). In spite of its flaws it
was very powerful and even beautiful in its way.
I wrote *immediate* predecessor for a reason, CSS was taken as starting
point for XSLFO and is still quite explicitely referred.
TeX was certainly one of the poineering applications in computerized
typesetting, and in fact virtually every modern typesetting system
still draws on the line breaking, filling, hyphenation and math expression
typesetting algorithms first hammered out for TeX. However, TeX did not
provide many good abstractions above paragraphs and formulas. It's
strength was (and still is) that it's basically a programming language
with a good run time library for typesetting. This allowed building many
interesting abstractions on top of it. In fact, I think packages like
LaTeX were a major milestone in the development of semantic markup and
therefore in the lineage of XML.
J.Pietschmann
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