Re: [Groff] Re: Simplifying groff documentation

[Michael(tm) Smith]

"Eric S. Raymond" <address@hidden>, 2006-12-23 18:01 -0500:

> FOP is at 0.92 level now.

I'm not sure that should be seen as a sign of stability. Certainly
it shouldn't be seen as sign that it's anywhere close to being
compliant with the XSL-FO 1.0 spec (it isn't). And anyway, the
release previous to 0.92 was numbered 0.20.5, so they made pretty
big leap in version numbering. And 0.92 is basically a complete
redesign of the previous code.

> What with Java going open, I expect the 
> DocBook -> XSL:FO -> PostScript path via FOP will get really good
> sometime in 2007 or early 2008.

I'd love to see that happen, but the I have to say that I think
the odds of FOP getting there by then are pretty slim. I've
followed FOP since its beginning (before it was even an Apache
project), and (along with a lot of other people) used to have
pretty high hopes for it getting to production quality. I don't
any more. Unless there's some dramatic change -- some more/new
developers going to work on it -- I don't think it will ever get
there. It'll remain useful for generating output from simple
documents, but not for anything beyond that. I'd love to be proven
wrong, though.

There is a alternative open-source DocBook-to-PDF/Postscript
option that already produces better output than FOP in many cases.
It's db2latex:

  http://db2latex.sourceforge.net/

It doesn't use XSL-FO at all. Instead it translates DocBook to
LaTeX and then uses TeX to generate output from that. I think that
approach is suboptimal; it'd be a lot better to have a good
open-source XSL-FO engine. But we don't have one, and lacking one,
db2latex seems to me the best way to get good PDF/print output
from DocBook *if you restrict yourself to only using free
software*. If you don't, you can use RenderX XEP (which, is for
use in generating documention for open-source software,
free-as-in-beer), and get professional-quality output.

The open-source XSL-FO engine project that truly deserves some
more help is Tony Graham's xmlroff:

  http://www.xmlroff.org/

It's a C application that uses the GNOME Print library and GLib,
GObject and Pango libraries as its backend (it doesn't use *roff
at all except in its name). The only thing it lacks is some more
developers to move it further along toward XSL-FO 1.0 compliance.

  --Mike

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