Re: Please resurrect xsl-fo tutorial on w3school

At 2015-10-26 08:35 -0500, Patrick Goetz wrote:
>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.

Nor I.

>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 think that would be an XSL-FO 1.2, not an XSL-FO 2.0.

I'm a user of Antenna House, RenderX and Ibex.

>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.

Perhaps this is why there has been no user demand for an XSL-FO 
2.0.  Certainly the combination of XSL-FO 1.1 + AHF Extensions has 
satisfied my clients to the extent that I made a career out of it and 
am now retired having fun doing standards volunteer work.  Some of 
that standards work is freely contributing XSLT/XSL-FO solutions for 
the community of users of the standards.

I continue to make these available as free resources on my web site.

At 2015-10-26 08:58 -0500, Patrick Goetz wrote:
>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.

I think it would only be revived if their users were not satisfied 
with what they had.  I can't see any business putting the effort into 
creating new technologies and supporting products without the 
customer pull for them ... else how would they recover their 
investments doing so?

As long as I was able to meet customer requirements with XSL-FO 1.1 + 
AHF, I had no need to approach the vendors asking for a new version of XSL-FO.

At least this is how I've justified in my own mind that there is no 
need (yet?) for an XSL-FO 2.0.  I don't fault the vendors at all.

I hope this is helpful.

. . . . . . . . . Ken


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Received on Monday, 26 October 2015 19:03:08 UTC