Date: Thu, 2 Jan 2003 09:50:09 +0000 From: Nik Clayton <nik@freebsd.org> To: Warren Block <wblock@wonkity.com> Cc: doc@freebsd.org Subject: Re: FDP Future And XSL Message-ID: <20030102095009.GA33071@clan.nothing-going-on.org> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0212192118560.61561-100000@wonkity.com> References: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0212192118560.61561-100000@wonkity.com>
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On Thu, Dec 19, 2002 at 09:36:19PM -0700, Warren Block wrote:
> Based on some of my web searching, it looks like XSL will be a much
> bigger player in the future than DSSSL. Certainly it seems to be much
> more active right now. Are the current DSSSL style sheets going to be
> around a long time, or is XSL in the works? (Is it worth my time to get
> the new XSL-FO book from OReilly if I want to stay compatible with FDP?)
Last time I looked (which, granted, was over 6 months ago), the main
problem was the lack of decent FOP -> PS / PDF processors. The main
contender was PassiveTeX (which is in the ports tree, print/passivetex),
but it didn't do that good a job. It was also 2 to 3 times slower than
JadeTeX.
Things may have changed since then, but I haven't had the chance to go
back and look at it in detail.
However, some of the early work in this area has been committed. =20
doc/share/xsl/ contains some simple skeleton XSL driver files, and=20
doc.docbook.mk supports a STYLESHEET_TYPE variable, so you can do
make FORMATS=3Dhtml STYLESHEET_TYPE=3Dxsl
to use the XSL stylesheets (the default is 'STYLESHEET_TYPE=3Ddsssl'). So
there's the beginnings of some support for this in the build
infrastructure -- you'll need to install ports/textproc/libxslt as well
for this to work. This isn't documented in detail yet, mainly because I
don't have too clear an idea of exactly what it's all going to look like
when it's finished.
What this needs is someone with some spare time to work on finishing the
proof of concept stylesheets so that HTML, PS, and PDF generation work
in a reasonably painless fashion when using XSL -- at least as painless
as using the DSSSL sheets[1]. This would be a great project for you (or
anyone else reading this) to tackle.
As I recall, the stumbling block I hit last time I was doing this was in
terms of parameterising the stylesheets. There's only one FreeBSD DSSSL
stylesheet (if you ignore the little customisations in the per-language
freebsd.dsl files), and this stylesheet uses SGML marked sections to
select which bits of the stylesheet are visible (HTML no images, HTML
with images, generic HTML, generic print, generic).
You can't do this with XSL stylesheets. So I have (uncommitted) files
that implement default.xsl, freebsd.xsl, freebsd-fo.xsl,
freebsd-html.xsl, and freebsd-html-chunk.xsl. That's probably still not
enough. I've put these up at
http://people.freebsd.org/~nik/xsl-test/
if anyone wants to use them as the starting point for something better.
N
[1] Depending on your definition of 'painless', of course. I well=20
remember the frustration of trying to climb the DSSSL learning
curve.
--=20
FreeBSD: The Power to Serve http://www.freebsd.org/ (__)
FreeBSD Documentation Project http://www.freebsd.org/docproj/ \\\'',)
\/ \=
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