Re: [docbook-apps] Keeping elements together

[Michael Smith <smith at xml-doc dot org>]

Hi Zbyszek,

You wrote:

> Jirka Kosek wrote:
  
[...]

> >XFC is not able to generate PDF output format. It can generate RTF or 
> >WordML. So if you want to get PDF you must use some other FO 

[...]

> Well, it's not the case since they provide the XSL Utility which is able 
> to generate HTML, RTF, and PDF. So, there must be something underneath. 
> I don't know what it is and have no time to investigate but it worked. 
> My question is: Does this toolset generate professional quality output? 

I think it uses Apache FOP for PDF output. If that is the case, I
don't think most people would say that it generates professional
quality PDF output. There are many parts of the XSL-FO spec that
FOP does not yet support. And the DocBook XSL stylesheets rely on
some of those. So the PDF output you get from DocBook via FOP is
somewhat degraded from what you get from XEP or XSL Formatter. In
some cases, you may actually get broken-looking PDF output from
FOP unless you put workarounds in your source to avoid the
limitations in FOP.

> Is it worth investing money?

Not worth investing money for the PDF output at least. FOP is free
software, so it doesn't make much sense to pay money to use it. I
can't speak about the RTF output or WordML output that XFC
provides, because I've never tried it.

But note that there is free software for generating WordML output
from XSL-FO -

  http://fo2wordml.sourceforge.net/

But it's also does not yet completely support all parts of the
XSL-FO spec.

Work is also being done on adding support for direct DocBook to
WordML transformation. But at this point, that is less complete
than fo2wordml.

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