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

On 12/17/2013 07:34 PM, Tony Graham wrote:
> 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.
>
If we consider just "markup", for some fairly loose definition of 
"markup", I guess that would rule out programmatic approaches like 
iText. Having said that, and not including DSSL which I only ever 
experimented with,my list would include troff (and siblings), TeX/LaTeX, 
XSL-FO, Quark, and Perl POD, off the top of my head. Quite a few 
BI/reporting apps like Cognos and LogiXML likely also qualify: output 
formats include PDF and XHTML+CSS+JavaScript, and the input artifacts 
are certainly not WYSIWYG.

I see that Jean mentioned the DITA Open Toolkit. Apart from things like 
iText, this has been the main system I've used recently. It features, 
for example, for some aspects of publishing when you use IBM FileNet.

Arved

Received on Wednesday, 18 December 2013 01:28:44 UTC