Re: Please resurrect xsl-fo tutorial on w3school

To follow up on this:

Is there any chance or reviving the XSL-FO 2.0 committee?  I'm surprised 
that, at the very least, the RenderX/Antenna House/Altova people aren't 
interested in moving this along a bit.

On 10/26/2015 08:35 AM, Patrick Goetz wrote:
> 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 13:58:46 UTC