Dirar Bougatef wrote:
xsl is mostly a specification, and there are program soutthere that implement parts of is. The page model that xsl uses is not that advanced. Also, because you more or less make up the page, you also sort of disable all kind of clever things that batch processors like tex + macropackages may do. This means that xsl (fo) is suited for a certain range of typesetting tasks. From my experience your expectations should not be that high with regards to complex layouts.
Do you mean that i went too far in my interpretation of XSL blocks as TEX boxes ? What i see is that XSL as you said is quiet the same thing as CSS2 hence it will support complex layouts (At the end it is only a matter of dividing your page into big or small boxes and the ability of accessing them, isn't it ?). In this case the difference with tex is only going to be that the last handles caracter (with ligatures etc.) and word spacing (with regard to hyphenation) according to some rules where the other doesn't.
there is more: pagebreaks, floats, marginal notes, etc those are the complicating factors
I have read an article that says that the whole matter about creating XSL was printed documents with all what this implies such as headers, footers, etc (The stuff that does not concern electronic documents).
indeed, simple docs with only headers and footers -)
i find that using tex directly (using the context xml parser) in most cases is rather efficient; the problem is always in getting (frequently inconsistent) designs done. In that respect my motto has become 'the problem does not change'
What do you mean by this. Is it that i have to stick to only few designs and avoid changing too much .. ?
no, that depending on the layout/design, finding a solution for some problem will always be difficult; kind of: it's nice to use some 4th generation language, but it still leaves us with the 10% hard work in a 3th one; look at all those editors we see around us: it's no big deal to cut and past a basic editor from components readily available, making a real good one is still some work -)
I would like to write my documents in XML, keep THEM on a server and generate PDF, when the user clicks on the link to my document. Of course i want to use Context to typeset my document. What can i use for this ? Have you already writen a parser for standard (e.g Docbook) documents ?
some have, not me; it's a matter of mapping elements onto context thingies, the parser is already there; just peek in the x-* files Hans ----------------------------------------------------------------- Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands tel: 038 477 53 69 | fax: 038 477 53 74 | www.pragma-ade.com | www.pragma-pod.nl -----------------------------------------------------------------