Re: Revise group description?

It occurred to me that I’ve heard about more and more Java-based PDF libraries in the last year. These guys: http://www.idrsolutions.com/java-pdf-library/ had a booth right next to Aptara’s booth at the last O’Reilly TOC conference.

It strikes me that there may be other Java PDF libraries out there, both open source and commercial that this group may be interested in if members are interested in learning about additional tools for creating PDF files (because I certainly don’t see PDF files going away anytime soon. For all my Digital Publishing talk, I’m as big a PDF junky as anyone else out there when it comes to my own collection of reference information).

Should we start a separate list for the various PDF producing Java libraries?

Just wondering.

-Jean (who really must return her attention to EPUBs now, or find herself in hot water with at least one future co-presenter…)

From: Kai Weber <sermo_de_arboribus@seznam.cz<mailto:sermo_de_arboribus@seznam.cz>>
Date: Saturday, December 28, 2013 at 2:01 PM
To: "public-ppl@w3.org<mailto:public-ppl@w3.org>" <public-ppl@w3.org<mailto:public-ppl@w3.org>>
Subject: Fwd: Re: Revise group description?
Resent-From: <public-ppl@w3.org<mailto:public-ppl@w3.org>>
Resent-Date: Saturday, December 28, 2013 at 2:01 PM


Re: Arved's statement on APIs and libraries and Tony's summary of mentioned layout technologies, it came to my mind, that I've used PDFlib for generating PDFs from a PHP environment. This library also is available with language bindings for Cobol, COM, C, C++, Objective C, Java, .NET, Perl, Python, REALbasic, RPG, and Ruby, so I guess it could be rather wide-spread in the developer community, though I don't have any actual data on that.
Anyway, I think PDFlib[1] could be another entry in the technology listing...

Best regards,
Kai Weber

[1]http://www.pdflib.com/products/pdflib-family/pdflib/


---------- Původní zpráva ----------
Od: Arved Sandstrom <asandstrom2@eastlink.ca<mailto:asandstrom2@eastlink.ca>>
Datum: 28. 12. 2013
Předmět: 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><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



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