[Groff] Lack of quality print output from DocBook [was: Simplifying groff documentation]

[Michael(tm) Smith]

Werner LEMBERG <address@hidden>, 2006-12-23 15:26 +0100:

> Mhmm.  I have yet to see a DocBook output which looks decent (in the
> sense of good typography) without postprocessing.  Maybe I've seen
> only bad examples so far -- can you point me to something?

If you mean Postscript/PDF output:

  Unicode Explained (Jukka K. Korpela)
  http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/unicode/

The source for that book was written in DocBook, and the
open-source DocBook Project stylesheets were used to generate the
XSL-FO output from which the Postscript for it was made.

O'Reilly has since published at least three other books so far
using XSL-FO output from the DocBook stylesheets.

That said, I don't think an open-source XSL-FO engine was used to
generate the Postscript output. Apache FOP no any of the
open-source XSL-FO engines are anywhere close to being capable of
generating production-quality output (unless you hobble your
DocBook source to work around their limitations).

But there are some proprietary XSL-FO engines that are very good.
RenderX XEP is one of them:

  http://renderx.com/

As far as I know, they will provide a licensed copy to all
developers of open-source applications who want to use XEP to
generate PDF/Postscript output of the documentation for their
applications.

  --Mike

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