On Nov 4, 2013, at 2:39 PM, Tony Graham wrote:
said, those of us in that business find ourselves having to reach out
more and more to programmers and consultants to do things we use to do
ourselves, so there certainly is a level of frustration in our business
What technology did you use to 'do ourselves'?
Sorry Tony, you're right. I didn't explain that very well seeing as how that's
what I'm suppose to be doing! :)
Until recently (the last 8 years or so), XML wasn't really a major player in
the tech pubs world. It was there, but really the tools of the trade were
FrameMaker, Word, and to a less extent everything else. It's the tech pubs
world that has seen an explosion of XML use, and with most small to medium size
companies not really having the knowledge to make things work, outside help
tends to be needed. That's what I was trying to say. Having anybody on staff
that really understands XSLT and XSL-FO to overcome a lot of the publication
issues tech pub organizations face is really a tough sell to management in a
lot of cases. Management was use to hiring a writer or two, who then typically
setup a stylesheet in FrameMaker or Word, then created output.
somebody who has css experience is easier and a lot of times you have
that experience within a company. However, with the exception of
MadCap's Flare product, which we're not using (not sure what engine they
licensed, but it uses CSS) nearly all the PDF publishing systems are
using XSLT/XSL-FO for building PDFs.
I was interested to see at the Paris workshop how many people were using
XSL-FO, though for the ones invited to speak, it really was 'were' in the
past tense.
What would it take to make XSL-FO easier to use for publishers?
From working in two companies that now use XML in the tech pubs department, I
think better tools. By that I mean tools that authors/writers can configure
themselves without massive amounts of training. That tends to be more GUI
oriented tools, which seem to be less common in XML-based workflows. Short of
that, I'm not really sure what would help. Some of it simply can't be
overcome. It's the nature of the beast. XSLT allows you to do some very
powerful filtering, but they are things writers and authors simply aren't use
to using and need outside help with.
Wayne
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