Re: [Groff] XSL-FO to groff to PDF?

[Larry Kollar]

OK, somehow my entire reply got deleted before I sent it (my copy in  
"Sent" is also blank).

Michael Smith wanted to know if anyone ever thought about a utility  
to translate XSL:FO to groff. My opinion is that it would be better  
to skip the translation to FO and go straight to groff, for several  
reasons:

1) By transforming directly to groff markup based on a macro package  
(ms or mm, or perhaps a purpose-built package), you can simplify the  
XSLT enormously, improving readability and maintainability.

2) As groff is a typesetting language, deferring typesetting issues  
to groff would seem to be The Right Thing.

3) By using command-line parameters, the same generated groff markup  
could be used to create, say, A4 and USletter versions of a manual.

4) By transforming source -> FO -> groff, you create an unnecessary  
step. Why not cut out the middleman, especially when he's not adding  
any value?

5) If your budget or philosophy requires Free Software, the only Free  
FO processor (FOP) is really inadequate for typesetting -- it's  
missing things like keep-with, for example. Someone on the  
FrameUser's list was complaining about that yesterday morning.

6) Groff, as a *roff derivative, is designed to be hand-edited. If  
you have a formatting crisis with a deadline (and that's when the  
crises happen, right?), it's a *lot* easier to go in & make a tweak  
to generated groff than it would be for FO... and then it would  
probably be easier to find and fix the problem at its source later  
(see #1).

7) FO is a display language, rather than a content markup language.  
Personally, I think that defeats the whole purpose of XML to begin with.

I can anticipate some objections here, primarily that many popular  
XML doc types already have XSL:FO stylesheets. But I'm not sure it  
would be any more work, short-term, to build new transforms directly  
to groff than it would be to create a groff -> FO utility (which  
could be done with XSLT itself). Long-term, I'm pretty certain it  
would be less work to transform directly to groff.

--
Larry Kollar     k  o  l  l  a  r  @  a  l  l  t  e  l  .  n  e  t
Unix Text Processing: "UTP Revival"
http://home.alltel.net/kollar/utp/