Re: Revise group description?

On 12/28/2013 11:06 AM, Tony Graham wrote:
> On Tue, December 17, 2013 6:19 pm, Jean Kaplansky wrote:
>> I know that most of the activity in this group has been around XSL-FO, but
>> I think we might get more interest if we just say:
>>
>> “For people interested in page layout technologies…” rather than
>> explicitly saying XSL-FO.
>>
>> I have a hunch that this may be chasing any but the most hardcore XSL-FO
>> enthusiasts away. We already know that there are a lot of people
>> experimenting with CSS for print, for example. Also while most people
>> think of eBooks as being reflowable, there’s a huge demand for fixed
>> layout pages in eBooks in trade and educational titles. We should try to
>> get some of these people interested in the group.
>>
>> Just my $.02.
>>
>> -Jean K.
>>
>> From: Dave Pawson <dave.pawson@gmail.com<mailto:dave.pawson@gmail.com>>
> ...
>> An alternative:
>> the Print & Page Layout Community Group is  here to discuss XSL-FO,
>> requirements or other aspects of XML in print.
>>
>> The success of the XSL-FO as a technology shows there's a
>> strong interest in development and  implementation. The
>> Print and Page Layout Community Group is intended as a place to
>> build a  community of XSL-FO users and  raise the
>> visibility of this  technology
> I don't think that it is viable for this CG to be only about XSL-FO.  I,
> personally, would much rather that this CG was neutral ground rather than
> just the last bastion of XSL-FO.  It is, of course, the last bastion of
> XSL-FO just because there is no other, but if that shouldn't be our sole
> purpose.
> [ SNIP ]
Fine post, very useful to me in summarizing issues. I am not intimately 
involved in the print and publishing field: for me it's an incidental 
albeit fairly frequent requirement to produce nicely-formatted stuff on 
paper. By incidental I mean simply that the printing requirement is 
secondary to systems that I am engaged to develop; but that does not 
diminish its importance. After all, people do love their reports. :-)

Name of the game out in the field, apart from publishing-oriented 
systems that I know very little about, developers muckle onto a library 
that works (like iText) or use a built-in for a BI system. A handful of 
folks use TeX/LateX or XSL-FO. If a client happens to have Quark or 
InDesign for some reason you try to use that, not because you want to, 
but the client paid big $$$ for the software.

What I am saying is that like 0.1 percent of all developers on the 
planet have ever heard of most of the technologies and products we are 
talking about here. But a whole whack of developers will be asked at 
some point to produce pretty reports: they will not be using a 
purpose-built high-end publishing app to do it. A successful and 
pervasive approach to print and publishing focuses - IMHO - on libraries 
and APIs for the most popular programming languages. Our major end user 
community here is not professional publishing experts.

XSL-FO still has a chance for the needs of the larger community, I 
think. But it's not being well advertised.

Arved

Received on Saturday, 28 December 2013 17:49:58 UTC