xml-dev - Future of Formatting Objects (XSL/FO)

[Thierry Hanser <thanser@cybercable.tm.fr>]

// First of all I appologies for reposting this message
// The reason is that the first attempt had no subject
// which is not very suitable for a mailing list

Hi,

The Problem:
============

I am currently looking for a nice way to
render XML documents on paged-media (e.g. paper, e-book...).

A possible (classical, basic) solution:
=======================================

Our aim is to choose XSL's Formating Object model
as a intermediate format. Moving from the original
XML schema to xsl:fo would be achieved in a normalized
way (using propriatary tools or XSL). Once we got
our xsl:fo representation of our document it is
possible to move further to other formats like PDF.

   XML + DTD

       |
       V

     XSL/FO

       |
  +----+----+
  |    |    |
  V    V    V

  TeX  PDF  ...

This trivial approach seems most simple and intuitive and fits with the intended
use of XSL/FO (at least I assume). 
My concern is now about the popularity of FO in the XML community. Except
for projects like (XEP at www.renderx.com or FOP at xml.apache.org) I
do not perceive a large exitment around formatting objects. I hope the reason
is that I have not had time enough to look more closely to all poccible work on
this topic and that XSL/FO is still a young model (yet at a draft stage). 

Announce we could hope to read in the near future would be like:

"New FO to PS rendering engine !"
or
"APRICOT ACME's text processor imports FO files"
or
"A new FO based Editor"
or even
"BANANA ACME's new printer is able to handle FO files"

As I am not expert in page-media publishing, I am
not able to evaluate the current power of FO and its
fitness with the wide field of paper-like publishing
It seems to me that the FO specifications are pretty
well designed (at last a humanly readable rendering model)
and quite comprehensive but I might be wrong.

Therefore I would be happy to  read your own feelings about the 
quality, cavits and future of the Formatting Object model.

Thanks for participating to this open debate...

Thierry

+=================================================+
| Thierry Hanser                                  |
|-------------------------------------------------|
| mailto: th@mail.jway.lu          (work)         |
| mailto: thanser@cybercable.tm.fr (home)         |
+=================================================+


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