- From: Patrick Gundlach <gundlach@speedata.de>
- Date: Mon, 30 Dec 2013 09:06:08 +0100
- To: xsl-fo Community Group <public-ppl@w3.org>
Am 30.12.2013 um 08:28 schrieb Arved Sandstrom <asandstrom2@eastlink.ca>: > Sort of my point previously: what a programmer might use for a publishing solution is probably considerably different than what publishing pros come up with. And there are probably more non-publishing professional programmers asked to do publishing than publishing professionals. IMO. but those who know the details of publishing should make the "standards", not the programmers. Otherwise you don't get the things right. Publishing (done right) is a very complex task, although it looks easy to most people. > Programmatic approaches to creating PDF and Postscript are nothing new to me, nor to many programmers tasked with publishing. I may be naive, but both formats appear to work well, and if you read and understand the specs, and write good programs, that often beats other stuff. Over a decade ago I was writing scripts to create PDF, which is relatively simple: it's not a very complex format. It might be a simple format, but IMO that is the worst approach that can a user take. While it might not be hard to create a PDF file, creating a PDF file that is suitable for today's publishing needs is. Take for example the following tasks: * Insert PDF file with layers (OCGs) where the layers should be merged with the main document layers having the same name * Add transparency * Use spot colors * Font subsetting / conversion (Type1 -> CFF for example) And that is just the PDF level. There are other higher level tasks such as h&j (hyphenation and justification), image reading, color management, font family management and even the user level tasks such as master pages, marginalia, running header, footers, running totals in tables, ... Using the "program that yourself" approach is reinventing the wheel over and over again. => We should look at the highest level, not the lowest level of PDF generation. Patrick Patrick Gundlach speedata Berlin, Germany +49 30 57705055 http://speedata.github.io/publisher/
Received on Monday, 30 December 2013 08:07:08 UTC