Re: XSL FO and the generation of "change bars"

Sebastian,

Many thanks for the response!

I have concluded that PassiveTex could probably be made to work this way, 
but of course it requires the TeX support.  (One reason that I think that 
PassiveTex could be made to work is that the current product I'm using, 
DECdocument, internally uses a TeX processor and everything is implemented 
using TeX in one way or another.)

I had not thought of the possibility of using PIs that the rendering engine 
would recognize and process.  I will discuss this possibility with the 
rendering engine vendor to see what they think.

And, yes, I am also aware that change bars are (as you say) a pig at the 
best of times ;^)

Thanks again,
    Jim

At 09:30 AM 05/10/2001 +0100 Thursday, Sebastian Rahtz wrote:
>Jim Melton writes:
>  > As some of you may know, I am responsible for producing a series of
>  > documents (the ISO SQL standard) that is frequently updated and 
> distributed
>  > to a largish group of people for on-going development work.  Change bars
>  > are essential to allow participants to readily see what has changed 
> amongst
>  > about 2,000 pages of text.  I am currently producing these documents 
> using
>  > DECdocument, but am in the process of converting them to XML, 
> producing PDF
>  > via XSL FO (using RenderX's XEP product).
>
>I cannot see how you are going to get this with XSL FO as it stands, I
>too shall be interested to see if anyone has a good answer. In the
>short term, I would implement it using processing instructions, and
>persuade your renderer to recognize them. One *could* argue that this
>(PIs) is in fact the correct way to work anyway.
>
>PassiveTeX would work in this way, it would just need some simple code
>to map the PIs to the apppropriate bit of raw TeX.
>
>Mind you, change bars are a pig at the best of times.
>
>Sebastian

========================================================================
Jim Melton --- Editor of ISO/IEC 9075-* (SQL)     Phone: +1.801.942.0144
Oracle Corporation            Oracle Email: mailto:jim.melton@oracle.com
1930 Viscounti Drive          Standards email: mailto:jim.melton@acm.org
Sandy, UT 84093-1063           Personal email: mailto:jim.melton@acm.org
USA                                                Fax : +1.801.942.3345
========================================================================
=  Facts are facts.  However, any opinions expressed are the opinions  =
=  only of myself and may or may not reflect the opinions of anybody   =
=  else with whom I may or may not have discussed the issues at hand.  =
========================================================================

Received on Monday, 21 May 2001 12:30:44 UTC