Re: [Embedlets-developer] Re: OpenOffice vs. Forrest

[Nicola K. B. <nic...@ap...>]

Jac Kersing wrote:
> On Sun, 2 Feb 2003, Nicola Ken Barozzi wrote:
> 
>>This is a feature that's been worked upon.
> 
> Any information on when it will be ready?

In opensource? A date? ;-)

If it's an important point for you, I'll bump it's priority.

>>There are errors in the above, because you are mixing tools that are not 
>>the same thing.
> 
> That's intentionaly, it provokes response :-)

;-P

That's a typical opensource mantra:
  - bad ideas with bad code don't attract anybody.
  - good ideas with good code attract users.
  - good ideas with bad code attract developers.

>>  - Openoffice here is a wordprocessor and a vector drawing program.
>>  - Docbook is a file format
>>  - Forrest is a publishing tool
>>
>>One could use all of them if he wanted: people are working on a 
>>OO->Docbook filter, and Forrest can quite easily work with DocBook.
> 
> OO is not able to handle DocBook and a filter will never be able to do a 
> perfect job. To write documents with a DocBook DTD one needs an editor 
> accepting a generic DTD or a specialized DocBook editor.

I agree.

>>Forrest as a publishing system has no rivals in the above comparison.
> 
> ...
> 
>>     - simplified docbook (almost there)
> 
> Ok, that sounds good, any ETA? Because we're looking at a lot of 'not yet 
> ready' components already and I'm hestitant to start using tools that 
> have not been proven yet. This project is challenging without our need to 
> worry about tools.

I'd not suggest to use Docbook unless there's a compelling reason. The 
stylesheet is there, but not yet tested extensively.

As for Forrest, the tool is really Apache Cocoon, that is more than 
proven. Forrest is an application built on Cocoon, and used to build 
many Apache websites.

>>     - SVG (automatic rendering to SVG)
> 
> And rendering SVG to PDF???

In the pages they can automatically render as PNG.
FOP is capable of rendering to PDF too IIRC, I can enable it.

>>It has only one issue: no editor.
>>Solution: make Forrest accept openoffice files as a source of content.
>>Forrest is based on Cocoon, and with Apache Cocoon it's very easy to add 
>>this kind of functionality.
> 
> That would require creating a translation for every OpenOffice tag to an 
> equivalent tag for the publishing format. I'm not sure this is an efford 
> we should start, writing this kind of xslt stylesheet is a project itself.

Not really. I did it for HTML and it's quite easy. The fact is that we 
don't support every HTML tag. We only support the semantical ones, not 
the presentational ones. Same would be with OO.

>>The problem of the CVS diffs remains though, since diffing binaries file 
>>is not possible, and diffs of the xml format of OpenOffice sucks badly.
> 
> That was to be expected. However, StarOffice includes functions to merge 
> changes different people made into a master document. A quick search in 
> the OpenOffice help suggests it is supported as well... (See help index: 
> Version management)

I find CVS diffs to be really better because of the way CVS works with 
multiple committs, merges, etc.

>>Currently Forrest is able to use html files as input, so using a simple 
>>html editor is another option. The html DTD doesn't suck that much, and 
>>decent editors make decent html source.
> 
> Not decent are:
> Word, Frontpage, MacroMedia tools and a lot more.
> 
> Just tried the OpenOffice (StarOffice 6 in my case) html mode and it
> actually didn't do as badly as I feared it would. The html code was
> reasonable clean and might even conform to a DTD. :-)

For Forrest consumption it doesn't need to conform, we pass it through 
jtidy.

>>Basically, it all boils down to the editor and the format it saves in.
>>AbiWord for example saves in docbook, but deosnt' have sections and no 
>>tables :-(
> 
> An editor without tables and sections won't work. Scrap Abiword, at least
> for the moment.

I reckoned.

>>Any further suggestion about editors and formats they save in?

I use Mozilla composer, btw.

> Nope, may-be one of the other participants????????


-- 
Nicola Ken Barozzi                   nic...@ap...
             - verba volant, scripta manent -
    (discussions get forgotten, just code remains)
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