From: Elvis S. <elv...@gm...> - 2008-06-29 11:21:44
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Hello xmlroff-people, Recently on the #scribus IRC channel, someone expressed an interest in creating an XSL-FO import plugin for Scribus [1]. This would be a "real" import plugin, and not just something that renders a PDF and imports that. I knew about libfo from xmlroff since before, and figured it might be of some use in creating such an import plugin, and I offered my help in the investigation of this, and also in the possible development of the plugin. So I have a few quite general questions about this endeavor :) What are your thoughts as xmlroff developers (Tony?) on the feasibility of using libfo in an XSL-FO import plugin? Do you think that having access to the internal area tree using libfo will help in leveraging some of the formatting capabilities of xmlroff during import into Scribus? I have a general knowledge about the formatting process of an XSL-FO formatter, and I know how formatting objects are broken up (or smashed together?) into areas and traits in an area tree. But I'm not quite sure what information is contained in this area tree, how much of it is accessible using the libfo API, or if it will be of any help in laying out pages, texts, images and tables in a Scribus document. I've taken a brief look at the gmodule-area-tree.c example from libfo-examples, but I'd love to have some input from knowledgeable xmlroff folks on the capabilities of libfo when it comes to retrieving layout information such as positioning, padding, font information et.c. This may be a very hard task, but that's why I found it interesting and volunteered to help, to the best of my abilities :) If you're not familiar with Scribus, it's a desktop publishing application. More details at http://www.scribus.net/. Thanks for your time everyone, and thanks to you Tony for still developing xmlroff. Regards, Elvis Stansvik |