In the context of DITA, the main open-source PDF tool (the PDF2 plugin for the
DITA Open Toolkit) is difficult to extend and customize and is not internally
consistent with the other Open Toolkit plugins (it's a sad case of good
intentions gone awry coupled with the vagaries of volunteer-developed open
source and the overall challenge of implementing pagination for complex
technical documents).
In that context, the fact that there are existing XSL-FO transforms is actually
a hindrance rather than a help and I'm hopeful that a CSS-based solution can
provide some relief there.
In the DITA context you already have to use Antenna House or XEP in order to
get appropriate PDF quality, so switching from XSL-FO to CSS using Antenna
House will not be a material change in tools acquisition costs but could
represent a dramatic reduction in implementation and maintenance costs.
Also, in the DITA case there is already a very good, easy-to-customize
DITA-to-HTML5 transform that can serve very well as the basis for a
DITA-to-HTML5-optimize-for-CSS-pagination transform. I would have already tried
to implement this if I wasn't so busy with other projects (including the
loose-leaf project I mentioned earlier).
Cheers,
Eliot
--
Eliot Kimber
http://contrext.com
On 1/17/18, 8:22 PM, "Liam R. E. Quin liam(_at_)w3(_dot_)org"
<xsl-list-service(_at_)lists(_dot_)mulberrytech(_dot_)com> wrote:
On Thu, 2018-01-18 at 02:00 +0000, Vasu Chakkera vasucv(_at_)gmail(_dot_)com
wrote:
> Thanks Liam..
> So is there a good reason to use xsl fo instead of princeXML ..Or
> vice versa?
If you have complex multi-page tables with repeated headers and footers
you'll probably get further with the XSL:FO stylesheets. The main
reasons to use CSS as i see it are
(1) if the CSS (or CSS knowledge) overlaps with other projects it might
be easier for you to work on (and there are more resources for learning
it)
(2) if you want to use new features that aren't in XSL-FO... but watch
that neither PrinceXML nor AntennaHouseFormatter will have the very
latest browser CSS features.
> I would have thought that there are ready made xslts available for
> docbook
> So a little bit of a style guide is all we need for look and feel ?
There are indeed off-the-shelf style sheets. Again, it depends on your
specific needs as to what's best.
Liam
--
Liam Quin, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Staff contact for Verifiable Claims WG, SVG WG, XQuery WG
Web slave for http://www.fromoldbooks.org/
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