Re: What layout/styling technologies have people used? [Was: Revise group description?]

That’s quite a list you’ve got going there. TeX is still very much in use in the scholarly publishing world.

Framemaker is very much in use for anyone who does DITA.

The DITA Open Toolkit still relies on FOP unless someone plugs in AntennaHouse or RenderX…

EPUB 3 = HTML5 + CSS3 by definition, including an addendum to support fixed layout

I wrote some fairly complex FOSIs for Arbortext’s original TeX based publishing engine from 1995 – 2000 and beyond. The default publishing engine was replaced with the Arbortext Professional Publishing engine (AKA 3B2) a couple of years ago. FOSIs were essentially replaced by Styler proprietary stylesheets. Kind of a bummer. You really could do some pretty cool things with a FOSI if you were in the know, tenacious, and had access to the engineers on the 4th floor… The APP engine is capable of far more sophisticated layouts, though. Unfortunately, it has taken a long time to put an interface on top of the engine to make it usable by mere mortals (compared to programming gurus).

The big two missing from your list are Quark and InDesign. Quark was the next big thing just as I was leaving the comp house where I did page layout with a pica stick and a calculator in 1995. InDesign seemingly took over the professional/trade/educational publishing world around 2006-2007.

Indesign server is a very popular option for SaaS providers.

BTW – in trade/professional/educational publishing most PDFs are considered “print ready” and prepared with profiles to go to printers.

-Jean

From: Tony Graham <tgraham@mentea.net<mailto:tgraham@mentea.net>>
Date: Tuesday, December 17, 2013 at 6:34 PM
To: "public-ppl@w3.org<mailto:public-ppl@w3.org>" <public-ppl@w3.org<mailto:public-ppl@w3.org>>
Subject: What layout/styling technologies have people used? [Was: Revise group description?]
Resent-From: <public-ppl@w3.org<mailto:public-ppl@w3.org>>
Resent-Date: Tuesday, December 17, 2013 at 6:34 PM

On Tue, December 17, 2013 8:06 pm, Jean Kaplansky wrote:
...
That said, the fact of the matter is that both functional and
declarative/procedural languages exist. As a community, we should think
utopian – get as many people discussing page layout stuff as possible,
regardless of their language preference. Some stuff that makes up the
craft of page layout remains the same regardless of programming language
preference.

Which got me thinking: language preferences can and do change over time,
so what have people here used to make pages from markup in the past as
well as the present?

'Make pages' is a loose definition since I don't know how to count either
EPUB or technologies that are predominantly for screen display (Isn't most
PDF just for screen display these days?), and I'm not looking to
distinguish between one-off tasks and technologies you used for years on
end.

My list includes:

- AGFA/Xerox CAPS

- Troff

- TeX

- Developed in-house

- FrameMaker

- DSSSL

- XSL-FO

- DynaText

- Panorama

- HTML+CSS

- EPUB

And yours?

Regards,


Tony.