Re: XSL-Fo to PDF

> 
> Just as an aside, I thought I should mention that I am in the throes of
> doing what David mentions was done for the XEP prototype, and what Ilya is
> in some stage of doing also. I have my xslfo-proc Sourceforge project, and
> a prototype in Perl is proving to be much more useful than UML.

Arved, I'll be very interested in taking a look at what you are doing and 
possibly joining forces or somehow complimenting each other.  No need to 
repeat the hard work.

>
> In any case, after getting laid off in October, working on a contract
> through the end of the year, and having started with Hummingbird last
> month, I've resumed open-source and started to make good progress with the
> xslfo-proc prototype.  I made the mistake of announcing the project last
> fall before code existed - something I'll not do again. :-) I expect to
> have a first upload of code in about a week (quite a lot of it, actually),
> and then continue work for a few months on the prototype until I feel ready
> to advance to the real thing.

Great, let me know when it's uploaded.   I'll also be checking for it from 
time to time.

>
> My general intention is to produce a C/C++ XSL-FO processor, and then
> provide SWIG wrappers. So in fact Perl would be available but the guts of
> the processor would be in C/C++. Based on prototype work so far I am
> leaning towards C.

Actually that was my plan in the long run, though I thought of first 
producing pure perl code and then optimizing with C.  Though XS was on my 
mind as SWIG has proven some instability to me in my previos work, though it 
might of been just lack of knowledge:-)

>
> Oddly enough (or perhaps not) I also decided that the most suitable PDF
> producer for the prototype (and very possibly for the final processor,
> because why re-invent the wheel?) is PDFLib.

Yes, for C it is.  Perl based, there are many modules that are fully featured 
and might be easier to use in some cases.  I actually thought about using 
PDFLib myself:-)

If you don't mind I might ping you from time to time if I need to.

Thanks a bunch.

Ilya


>
> I generally support David's comments, although I must admit I am pleasantly
> surprised so far by the performance of my prototype. I'm very comfortable
> with Perl but I don't think I would want to produce a final production
> release of an XSL-FO processor written in it. But time will tell.
>
> I might note that since I am doing a prototype it is actually important for
> me to make it as full-featured as possible, because I am trying to validate
> the final design decisions. Without detracting from James Tauber's
> important initial contributions, I must say that IMO one of the central
> problems with Apache FOP is that it was designed and implemented so as to
> support a small subset of XSL formatting objects and properties. It started
> showing architectural problems over a year ago as a result. Good work is
> now being done by some of my fellow FOP committers to re-work the design,
> but the point is that that rework need never have happened. I am trying to
> avoid that.
>
> Regards,
> Arved Sandstrom

Received on Thursday, 21 February 2002 23:13:01 UTC