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Re: [xsl] xsl-fo and professional publishing

2014-06-13 16:06:38
I'm happy to be proven wrong on my no-FO-in-publishing assertion--mine is
based on what I've seen in my Publishing clients, but then I have those
clients largely because they don't already have a good XML solution, so
there's very likely some selection bias there.

Liam: are you able to disclose who any of these larger publishers are? I
don't doubt your assertion, just curious who they are.

It does make sense that for fiction, in particular, it would be entirely
realistic to use XSL-FO and some relatively simple parameterization of
details like page geometry, fonts, and chapter opener decoration to
produce good-quality books.

Cheers,

E.
—————
Eliot Kimber, Owner
Contrext, LLC
http://contrext.com




On 6/13/14, 3:48 PM, "Liam R E Quin liam(_at_)w3(_dot_)org"
<xsl-list-service(_at_)lists(_dot_)mulberrytech(_dot_)com> wrote:

On Fri, 2014-06-13 at 13:10 +0000, jfrm(_dot_)maurel(_at_)gmail(_dot_)com
jfrm(_dot_)maurel(_at_)gmail(_dot_)com wrote:
Hi,

I wonder whether xml + xsl + xsl-fo is a current practise in
professional publishing for technical books at least in Europe.

To give a counterpoint to Eliot's response, XSL-FO is very, very widely
used in professional publishing; the largest publishers use XSL-FO (and
in some cases XHTML + CSS) for most of their fiction and mainstream
texts.

There are relatively few publishers using it, but between them they
produce most of the books you see - although there's much more diversity
in Europe than in the USA in that regard.

The reasons are (1) they need to produce lots of books that look
similar; (2) they need to produce ebooks in XHTML, not just PDF (e.g.
for Kindle); (3) they need to minimise hand-work.

Viable alternatives for a single book include Scribus (open source),
XHTML + CSS (but the formatters that are good enough are expensive and
for technical work there are severe limitations; however, that's what
O'Reilly is now doing), Adobe InDesign or Framemaker, and many other
tools. It's *possible* to use MS Word, but you need a lot of discipline,
and at the end of the process making an ebook will be a pain although
there are products to help.

There's even at least one course taught on using XSL-FO for publishers,
at the Stuttgart media centre.

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml


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