- From: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@metalab.unc.edu>
- Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2000 15:55:29 -0400
- To: <www-style@w3.org>
At 3:30 PM -0400 10/2/00, Jelks Cabaniss wrote: >Håkon Wium Lie wrote: > >> Which again begs the question: why hasn't anyone produced a decent >> >> X(HT)ML + CSS -> PDF >> >> converter? > >What about Adobe Acrobat? Couldn't you just "print to PDF" from your >favorite UA? > You could, and I think that's what people hope will eventually happen; but the fact is even if tomorrow Netscape or IE suddenly offered full and accurate support for CSS2, they will still wouldn't be suitable for publishing. There are a LOT of holes in browser printing support that would be considered show-stoppers in a word processor, much less a desktop publishing program. For instance, in Netscape 4 on the Mac if one page of the print out goes a little too far over the right edge of the paper, then every page printed out is doubled up with a blank page. There are a lot of other little problems, as well as just a general cluelessness about proper printing support. Bottom line: browsers print well enough to let you read something offline. They don't print well enough to let you do professional quality work like TeX or Quark. That's where I see XSL-FO fitting in. I want to be able to use one style sheet to produce an online book in HTML+CSS and another to produce the PDF file I send to the printer. -- +-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+ | Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer | +-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+ | The XML Bible (IDG Books, 1999) | | http://metalab.unc.edu/xml/books/bible/ | | http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0764532367/cafeaulaitA/ | +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+ | Read Cafe au Lait for Java News: http://metalab.unc.edu/javafaq/ | | Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://metalab.unc.edu/xml/ | +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
Received on Monday, 2 October 2000 16:07:01 UTC