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

[Werner LEMBERG]

> [...] 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 semantically (that is, one that isnt't targeted
> for processing by a single system -- TeX, groff, or whatever).

A bad trade-off IMHO.  What I imagine is to conditionally tag the
input for a certain output `device' (be it LaTeX, troff, or whatever).
Such tags are ignored if the document is converted to a different
device.  The more such data is in the original input file, the better.
I don't like the idea to edit intermediate files.  It's far too easy
to overwrite or remove them accidentally -- and sometimes it's
necessary to regenerate them because the source has changed.  It would
be crazy to start over again with adaptation to the output device.

> 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.

Well, this means that we should concentrate on converting to either
TeX (be it LaTeX or ConTeXt) or troff.


    Werner