Re: [xmlroff] xmlroff's "story"?

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

Stefan Seefeld <se...@sy...> writes:
> Tony Graham wrote:
>
>> To boil that down to as few words as possible, it looks to me like people want
>> a high-quality, multi-platform formatter that excels at DocBook formatting and
>> that integrates easily with other programs and with scripting languages.
>> So how about that as the "story"?
>>    xmlroff is a high-quality, multi-platform XSL formatter that excels at
>>    DocBook formatting and that integrates easily with other programs and with
>>    scripting languages.
>
> That sounds good, though there is one important word amiss: 'free' !

I did later think of that.  If it's on SourceForge, it's free by definition,
but that would be so obvious on xmlroff.org, plus there's the lingering bad
press from previously using PDFlib.

> There are a number of fo processors out there, but none is free. The only
> two contenders these days are xmlroff and fop.
>
> I'm not sure whether integration is really that big a point. As far as
> one-click behavior concerns, that's a feature for editors and other 'frontends'
> that would call into xmlroff. But xmlroff itself doesn't need to care, does it ?

There's one-click behaviour and there's calling xmlroff from your program.

If libfo can be called from another program, that's easier and more reliable
(memory leaks excepted) than requiring the program to exec the xmlroff
executable.  If someone uses that to implement one-click formatting, then all
the better.

I was merely echoing what I saw from the previous discussions, but I do think
it's useful to be able to run the formatter from more than just the command
line.

So the current candidate story becomes:

   xmlroff is a completely free, high-quality, multi-platform XSL formatter
   which excels at DocBook formatting that you can run as a standalone
   formatter or call from your own program.

Or words to that effect.

Regards,


Tony.