Re: [xmlroff] Success report, and some comments

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

Steve Cheng <g3c...@cd...> wrote at Fri, 13 Aug 2004 20:20:31 -0400:
> Hello *!

Hello and welcome.  Please subscribe to the xmlroff mailing list if
you want to continue to discuss xmlroff.

> I have downloaded the latest versions of xmlroff and
> pangopdf and tried it out.  No problems with the building
> of the packages.

That's good to hear.

> This is with PDFlib; nothing wrong with gnome-print,
> I just didn't have time to download all the dependencies.

What OS are you using?  If you are using a recent version of Linux or
Solaris you should have most of the libraries that you need.

> Unfortunately I have to find out the user-unfriendly way
> that xmlroff doesn't seem to support CSS-style shorthand
> properties, at least for "margin".  If I attempt to use it,
> I get a barrage of libfo critical errors and xmlroff then
> either aborts or segfaults.  When I separate it to the various
> "margin-*" properties xmlroff works fine[*]. (This may be
> the answer to a previous post by Giuseppe Greco.)

The lack of support stems from working on 'Basic' conformance before
'Complete'.  The individual properties are part of 'Basic'
conformance, and the shorthands are part of 'Complete'.

Shorthand support is yet another of those things that are in
progress.  The 'padding' shorthand has been done.  I can give you
advice about what to work on if you want to implement the rest.

The user unfriendliness is unplanned.  Please submit a bug report.

> Whoever is in charge (I guess Tony Graham?) may want to

Tony Graham in his spare time.

> document this.  Anyway thanks for writing xmlroff.

Conformance is documented at http://xmlroff.org/conformance.html

The stylesheet at examples/xml2003/fixup.xsl will munge your FO to
expand shorthands and remove unsupported FOs so your FO file has a
better chance of working with xmlroff.

> [*] This is of course with a very simple FO document I created,
> nothing from big stylesheets :)  I'm still learning FO right now.
> 
> -- 
> Steve Cheng
> &#x912D;&#x541B;&#x535A;
> 
> docbook2X: <URL:http://docbook2x.sourceforge.net/>

It's a small world.  I'm still trying to find the time to use your TeX
markup so I can convert the XSL spec into info files so I can
distribute it with my XSL mode for Emacs.

Regards,


Tony.