Re: [Groff] Lack of quality print output from DocBook

[Michael(tm) Smith]

Werner LEMBERG <address@hidden>, 2007-01-03 17:59 +0100:

> Well, yes, but I wonder how much hand-editing has been done?

I don't know actually. I think not terribly much, because if the
XSL-FO toolchain had required an unreasonable amount of
hand-editing, they would not have used it for all the other books
that they have since used it for.

> This is, the document has been written, and you are going to
> fine-tune the appearance for a particular device (avoiding
> orphans here, increasing the page height by one line there,
> etc., etc.), then where does this information get stored?  I
> doubt that XSL-FO is more intelligent than LaTeX, so you have to
> adjust the pages in a typographical manner similar to it.  In a
> LaTeX document, I can store this data within the source file.
> What about DocBook?

DocBook itself does not provide any means for marking up pages
breaks. By design. But XML provides a simple way to mark up
processing instructions -- for example, <? page-break ?>. An XML
processing application (for example, and xslt stylesheet) can
either choose to simply ignore that PI (which is what you'd want
it to do if it were generating HTML output) or to do something
with it (for example, if it's generating XSL-FO ouput, replace it
with the proper XSL-FO markup for a page break).

That said, I am certain that LaTeX allows you a lot tighter
control over such things than an XML/XSL-FO toolchain ever will.
I guess loss of that control over presentational fine-tuning is
one of the trade-offs that comes with having a system-independent
means of marking up content semanatically (that is, one that
isnt't targeted for processing by a single system -- TeX, groff,
or whatever).

> > That said, I don't think an open-source XSL-FO engine was used to
> > generate the Postscript output.
> 
> This is very sad.

Indeed. And that state of things (the lack of any open-source
tools for generating production-quality output from XSL-FO) does
not show any signs of changing any time soon.

The only thing I can imagine that might change it would be if XEP
were to be open-sourced. But I don't see that happening.

  --Mike

-- 
Michael(tm) Smith
http://www.w3.org/People/Smith/