Re: [xmlroff] Problems when invoking xmlroff

[Tony G. <Ton...@Su...>]

Giuseppe Greco wrote at 29 May 2003 18:32:15 +0200:
 > I'm new to xmlroff...

As is everybody else (except me).

 > I'm interested in xmlroff since it is the only FO
 > processor written in C... (fop is written in Java, and I

The main reason why xmlroff is written in C is because at the time I
started there was no other open source XSL processor written in C.

 > don't like Java stuff, and passiveTeX has problems when
 > rendering tables).
 > 
 > Well, I've downloaded, compiled, and installed all the
 > required modules (PangoPDF, PDFLib, etc.), and of course,
 > xmlroff itself without problems... but I'm not able to
 > process any xml file.

I'm glad that you were able to compile it okay.

Can you process xmlroff.fo from the xmlroff distribution?

 > I've tried to process a FO file generated with xsltproc:
 > 
 > xmlroff -o myfile.pdf myfile.fo
 > 
 > ... but xmlroff never returns and at the end my PC simply
 > goes down...
 > 
 > I get a number of error messages like this:
 > 
 > (process:1424): libfo-CRITICAL **: fo-fo-error:
 >   FoMarker not allowed as child of FoBlock
 > Object path: /FoTree[1]/root[1]/page-sequence[1]/flow[1]/FoBlock[1]
 >   /FoBlock[1]/FoBlock[1]/FoBlock[1]/FoBlock[1]/FoMarker[1]
 > 
 > Does anybody know how to solve this problem?

The problem is that xmlroff does not yet support markers.

The partial solution is to park markers in a GList attached to the FO
containing the marker (and I added an FoMarkerParent type to do this),
but it hasn't been fully implemented since I've spent my recent time
getting xmlroff to work with GNOME Print instead of PDFlib.

The solution to your problem is to implement marker support.

Please file a bug report or enhancement request on SourForge about
xmlroff not supporting markers.

Ways to get around the lack of marker support include:

 - Don't generate them

 - Write a stylesheet to filter them out of your .fo files

 - Work on marker support yourself

In the interim, since xmlroff doesn't support markers, I regret that
your output would not look as you expect anyway.

Regards,


Tony Graham
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