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Over 10 years ago I wrote a tool to transform Open Office files (with proper styles applied) to Docbook using XSLT and Schematron. It was fun to do. Now all the
by bambax 7y ago
Over 10 years ago I wrote a tool to transform Open Office files (with proper styles applied) to Docbook using XSLT and Schematron. It was fun to do. Now all these techs seem to have almost completely disappeared, which is kind of sad. It was fun.
- chrisseaton 7y agoDid XSL FO ever become used somewhere serious? That seemed an incredibly powerful tool but so complicated and it didn't ever seem to be fully implemented.
- ivoc 7y agoThere's AntennaHouse and PrinceXML, but both are pretty pricey ($3-5K / server), and both of these do now support CSS as well. Apache FOP / Batik is okay for generating nice looking PDFs, but its SVG rasterization is much worse than that of Chrome's PDF renderer (Skia). As I didn't get the memo about XML being dead, I'm still using Docbook and XSLT/XInclude to structure and filter content written in markdown/rst. But I will be switching over from XSL-FO to CSS paged media for layout as soon as Chrome supports bookmarks in PDF output, or either WeasyPrint or wkhtmltopdf improve their CSS3 column support.
- jamespaden 7y agoBiased cause I work there, but DocRaptor offers a saas API version of the Prince library with a much lower usage-based monthly fee.
- bambax 7y agoCocoon used (uses?) Apache FOP to generate PDFs on the fly. You could produce documents from a search with the search terms highlighted inside the PDF... It felt magical. This was in 2001!
- bjoli 7y agoI have been waiting for XML to become cool again for the last 15 years. I started writing XML for all my personal blogs and sites back then, and I still use the same markup. It has been fun to see all the static site generators popping up to solve problems that never existed. At least not for old farts like myself that like XSLT.