Advice Please: SAXON, Xalan, JADE, LaTeX, and XSL:FO

[Shawn T. Rutledge]

On Mon, Aug 06, 2001 at 02:13:13PM -0700, Trent Shipley wrote:
> 30: SAXON vs Xalan vs JADE
> 
> 31: Has anyone worked with these freeware products?  How do they compare?

I tried Xalan once; I don't remember a lot except that XSLT seems
really obtuse to me.
> 
> 32: I have done some research on XSLT and am pretty sure I can get the hang
> of it.  The _structure_ of DSSSL looks pretty similar to XSLT (historically
> the other way around, of course).  How much harder is it to use DSSSL than
> XSLT?

See also this:

http://www.xml.com/pub/a/1999/05/xsl/xslconsidered_1.html

I think he's arguing to use DSSSL for hardcopy documents (because it's 
more powerful) and CSS for electronic documents (because it's more suited
to electronic documents, easier, and preserves the XML's meta-information 
better).  But I don't have enough experience with all of these to be sure
whether he is right.

> 43: The text is on young people in Jordan.  I will be using the standard
> Latin-1 characters plus the Arabic Unicode code page plus a couple of other
> Latin code pages plus a Greek and a Cyrillic code page to transliterate the
> Arabic.  It looks like FO has much better support for internationalization
> than LaTeX.  It looks like LaTeX is limited largely to European languages.

Yeah I don't know about the Arabic; I know it has Cyrillic and can't imagine
it not having greek (necessary for math stuff).  A quick web search should
tell you whether it's got Arabic fonts.
> 
> 44: I suspect that WordPerfect and Word can read FO documents, but I'm not
> 100% sure.  I can't find an FO to TeX or dvi or PostScript converter on
> SourceForge.  bummer.

If all else fails you could bypass TeX and write directly in Postscript, or 
write something to convert your SGML to Postscript.  Maybe you could try the 
"gonzo" package at www.tinaja.com and modify as necessary; it has basic 
routines for page-layout.  But I haven't used it myself yet.  I have 
written only very simple Postscript (for example to print envelopes on 
my laser via Linux - I couldn't find any other way to do it).  I added 
a feature to Nettebook for this; I start with a Postscript "template" 
which has XML tags in it; I replace the XML tags with appropriate stuff 
from the database (name, address etc.); and then send it to lpr.  The 
result is I can select a person in the database (via the web interface) 
and print an envelope.  The tag-substitution is done via simple find-and-
replace in PHP.

-- 
  _______                   Shawn T. Rutledge / KB7PWD  ecloud@bigfoot.com
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