Re: Please resurrect xsl-fo tutorial on w3school

Hi -

Not sure how I missed this email from months ago, but:

Surely CSS isn't being seen as a complete replacement for XSL-FO?

Admittedly the technology is complicated and a bit hard to wrap your 
brain around, but I haven't found anything which does a better job for 
creating formatted PDF's of lengthy technical documents / semantically 
formatted text.

I'm currently using RenderX xep and Antenna House AH Formatter.  In my 
opinion, XSL-FO 2.0 should just add most of the Antenna House ah- 
extensions to the language and be done with it.  I've rarely found a 
need for anything beyond that save for a feature found in TeX, which 
allows 2 passes through the data in order to determine final PDF page 
locations and then add page numbers to references.  This would be 
obviously useful.

On 03/19/2015 07:25 PM, Liam R. E. Quin wrote:
> On Thu, 2015-03-19 at 05:03 -0500, Patrick Goetz wrote:
>> On 3/18/2015 9:49 PM, anon anon wrote:
>>> I understand w3 is moving towards CSS3, however, I am
>>> picking up legacy code that's not documented by a coworker, and I
>>> believe if I were to go through the same tutorial that the person
>>> went through, then it would help me too.
>>
>>
>> Is CSS3 going to address the chronic deficiencies of XSL-FO 1.1;
>> e.g. not being able to count elements on a physical page (e.g. in
>> order to set footnote labels properly)?  Is this why the XSL-FO 2.0
>> effort was abandoned?
>
> You don't need to count objects on a page to reset footnote numbering;
> rather, it's meant to be used declaratively.
>
> The XSL-FO 2 ework did add support for automatic numbering.
>
> Probably for CSS footnotes today you use counter-reset: footnote; in
> the @-rule for your page.
>
> We abandoned the work because no-one was showing up to meetings, or
> not enough people I should say - one, two or three people, compared to
> forty people at a CSS meeting.
>
>> For a tutorial introduction to XSL-FO, I highly recommend "XSL
>> Formatting Objects" by Doug Lovell.  No free download, but I've read
>> all
>> English language XSL-FO books, and this is by far the best for
>> learning the language.  If you read German, there's also "XSL-FO" by
>> Marco Skulschus and Marcus Wiederstein.
>>
>>
>

Received on Monday, 26 October 2015 13:45:46 UTC