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Sender: ulim
Message-ID: <3A18F8BF.8CF39A56@denic.de>
Date: Mon, 20 Nov 2000 10:11:11 +0000
From: Ulrich Mayring <ulim@denic.de>
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To: cocoon-users@xml.apache.org
Subject: Re: AW: AW: SQL->XML->???->PDF transformation
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Henning von Bargen wrote:
> 
> OK, the PDFs are cool-looking .
> But as I understand it, they are created with a commercial(?) tool
> and not by writing FO instructions manually.
> Has this software also a more ore less WYSIWIG interface to create the
> layout?
> Do you use it yourself?

Well, the company sells a commercial FO => PDF renderer (sort of like
fop), but that has nothing to do with XSLFO, which is a W3C standard. I
just wanted to show that IS possible to create complex layouts and
cool-looking documents with XSLFO.

As far as WYSIWYG interfaces go, that is not the job of a FO renderer. A
FO renderer just takes XSLFO files and renders them to PDF or whatever.
An FO renderer doesn't care how you create the FO files.

To create FO files there are currently two ways I am aware of and there
will be a third:

1) Write the FO manually. This is tedious, but, like writing TeX in vi,
it can be done with enough training. But it doesn't really make any
sense.

2) Use an XSLT stylesheet to convert XML to FO. I've used this technique
with great success for creating mass mailings, which were customized
with data from a database.

In the future I expect there to be:

3) Use your favorite page layout app and save the document as XSLFO.

Ulrich

-- 
Ulrich Mayring
DENIC eG, Systementwicklung