xmlroff-list

[xmlroff] What needs to be done to make xmlroff a success?

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

I was thinking about what next to do for xmlroff, then I got to thinking of
asking you people what to do next for xmlroff, then I ended up deciding to ask
about the big picture for xmlroff.

I would define the purpose of the xmlroff project as:

   To develop an open source, conformant, multilingual XSL formatter capable
   of producing printable output from XML for most technical and business
   documents.

The project's principles are:

 - xmlroff should be free.

 - There's room in this world for more than one open source XSL formatter.

 - There's room in this world for open-source, free but not open, and
   commercial XSL formatters.

It's been a while since I've had this sort of conversation with myself, let
alone with anybody else, and I surprised myself by not mentioning C or GNOME.

Given the above, a successful outcome for the project would be:

   A multilingual XSL formatter with conformantly implements the formatting
   objects and properties necessary for formatting most technical and business
   documents.

Nobody is going to tell you that the current xmlroff represents that
successful outcome.

Opinions on the purpose, principles, outcome, etc., of the project are
welcome, but if the definition of a successul outcome is sufficiently accurate
for your purposes, my question is:

   What needs to be done to make xmlroff a success?

To brainstorm for a moment, ideas that come to mind include:

 - Implement region-before, region-after, etc.

 - Implement markers

 - Provide RPMs as well as SRPMs and .tar.gz downloads

 - Provide a Windows port

 - Improve developer documentation

 - Improve end-user documentation

 - Rewrite in a more OO language

 - Rewrite in...

 - Sack the maintainer

 - Put the statement of purpose on the xmlroff web page

Any and all ideas are welcome at this point.  We can categorise and organise
the ideas later.

Regards,


Tony.

Re: [xmlroff] What needs to be done to make xmlroff a success?

[Aron S. <elv...@gm...>]

2006/1/27, Tony Graham <Ton...@su...>:
...
>  - Rewrite in a more OO language
>
>  - Rewrite in...

Do you have any specific language in mind? I'm just asking because
your e-mail just popped up as I was reading about the D programming
language* which looks quite interesting.

Best regards,
Aron Stansvik

* http://www.digitalmars.com/d/

Re: [xmlroff] What needs to be done to make xmlroff a success?

[Gerrit P. H. <ge...@fa...>]

Aron schrieb:

> 2006/1/27, Tony Graham <Ton...@su...>:
> ...
>>  - Rewrite in a more OO language
>>
>>  - Rewrite in...

> Do you have any specific language in mind? I'm just asking because
> your e-mail just popped up as I was reading about the D programming
> language* which looks quite interesting.

> Best regards,
> Aron Stansvik

> * http://www.digitalmars.com/d/


IMO rewriting is not neccessary.  Isn't it already written in the most
portable language?  I prefer xmlroff over all other solutions because it
is not Java like all the other solutions.


Gerrit
-- 
=^..^=

Re: [xmlroff] What needs to be done to make xmlroff a success?

[Gerrit P. H. <ge...@fa...>]

- Emacs / Xemacs integration.
- OpenOffice integration
- More editor integration (Nedit, ....)
- Standalone FOP editor with xmlroff integration?

So I could edit a FOP document and with one click I get the PDF.

Gerrit
-- 
=^..^=

Re: [xmlroff] What needs to be done to make xmlroff a success?

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

Aron Stansvik <elv...@gm...> writes:
> 2006/1/27, Tony Graham <Ton...@su...>:
> ...
>>  - Rewrite in a more OO language
>>
>>  - Rewrite in...
>
> Do you have any specific language in mind? I'm just asking because
> your e-mail just popped up as I was reading about the D programming
> language* which looks quite interesting.

No, I don't have any specific language in mind.  I was just fishing for
people's thoughts.

D does look cool, and I would dearly love native OO and garbage collection,
but it wouldn't be a good fit if the intention is for xmlroff to be
GNOME-like.

It would be fun, but a big diversion, to write spec-dump XSL files to produce
D code instead of C code.

Regards,


Tony.

> * http://www.digitalmars.com/d/

Re: [xmlroff] What needs to be done to make xmlroff a success?

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

"Gerrit P. Haase" <ge...@fa...> writes:
> - Emacs / Xemacs integration.

What do you mean?

If you use my xslide XSL mode, you could setup xmlroff as one of the XSL
processor options.

> - OpenOffice integration

Why not just create PDF using OpenOffice?

> - More editor integration (Nedit, ....)

What do you mean?  I would advise creating XML using a vocabulary that means
something to you, rather than writing in the presentation-oriented XSL-FO
vocabulary.

> - Standalone FOP editor with xmlroff integration?

Do you mean "FO"?  FOP is an XSL formatter written in Java.

> So I could edit a FOP document and with one click I get the PDF.

But, again, I question why you would create documents in the XSL-FO category.

Regards,


Tony.

Re: [xmlroff] What needs to be done to make xmlroff a success?

[Stefan S. <se...@sy...>]

Tony Graham wrote:

> It's been a while since I've had this sort of conversation with myself, let
> alone with anybody else, and I surprised myself by not mentioning C or GNOME.

Heh ! :-)

> Given the above, a successful outcome for the project would be:
> 
>    A multilingual XSL formatter with conformantly implements the formatting
>    objects and properties necessary for formatting most technical and business
>    documents.
> 
> Nobody is going to tell you that the current xmlroff represents that
> successful outcome.
> 
> Opinions on the purpose, principles, outcome, etc., of the project are
> welcome, but if the definition of a successul outcome is sufficiently accurate
> for your purposes, my question is:
> 
>    What needs to be done to make xmlroff a success?
> 
> To brainstorm for a moment, ideas that come to mind include:
> 
>  - Implement region-before, region-after, etc.
> 
>  - Implement markers

I'm not qualified to comment on these two items, as I'm 'only' a user.
However, I think a good measure for success and adoptation in the FOSS
community is xmlroff's ability to process docbook into pdf (i.e. notably
the fo generated by Norm Walsh's xsl stylesheets).

>  - Provide RPMs as well as SRPMs and .tar.gz downloads

These are pure convenience. As soon as you have a tarball and a simple
build system that conforms to current standard practice, people will be
able to write packagers (e.g. rpm spec files).

>  - Provide a Windows port

That would be nice.

>  - Improve developer documentation

That would be nice, too, though I'm not sure in what sense it is lacking.
You already seem to have good embedded API documentation. Is that already
extracted and processed into an (online) reference manual ?

>  - Improve end-user documentation

I'm not sure what is lacking here, either. The most important information
for users, at this time, is the conformance matrix that informs potential
users about the current status.

>  - Rewrite in a more OO language

I'm not sure that would be such a good idea, at least not if by 'rewrite'
you mean 'start over from scratch'. Migrating would be a different matter...

Being a C++ developer myself, I would of course replace the GObject-based
type system by a true compiler-supported type system. :-)
But I'm not sure how practical that is, and whether there is really any
gain at this point. (It would be wonderful if xmlroff could become
GNOME-independent, though I doubt this is possible due to its dependence
on pango, right ?)

Regards,
		Stefan

Re: [xmlroff] What needs to be done to make xmlroff a success?

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

Tony Graham <Ton...@Su...> writes:
...
>    What needs to be done to make xmlroff a success?

Taking some liberties with the posts from the last few days (and happily
listing contradictory ideas at this stage), this is the current list of ideas
for making xmlroff a success:

 - Implement...

 - Implement region-before, region-after, etc.

 - Implement markers

 - Provide RPMs as well as SRPMs and .tar.gz downloads

 - Provide a Windows port

 - Provide a Debian port

 - Provide a Solaris port

 - Improve developer documentation

 - Improve end-user documentation

 - Rewrite in a more OO language

 - Rewrite in...

 - Rewrite in D

 - Rewrite in C++

 - Keep it in C

 - Lose the reliance on GLib/GObject

 - Get rid of PangoXSL

 - Sack the maintainer

 - Put the statement of purpose on the xmlroff web page

 - Counteract outdated negative perceptions from when xmlroff used PDFlib

 - Be the best DocBook formatter on the planet

 - Support more graphics formats

 - Produce output in...

 - Produce output in SVG

 - Integrate with editors

 - Provide one-click formatting from within an editor

I'm just looking for ideas at this point.

 - What would it take for xmlroff to become the first thing you load onto your
   computer after the OS?

 - What would it take for you to junk your current word processor or
   formatting system in favour of XSL-FO and xmlroff?

 - What would it take for xmlroff to be your tool of choice for formatting
   XML?

Regards,


Tony.

Re: [xmlroff] What needs to be done to make xmlroff a success?

[Aron S. <elv...@gm...>]

2006/1/30, Tony Graham <Ton...@su...>:
> Tony Graham <Ton...@Su...> writes:
> ...
> >    What needs to be done to make xmlroff a success?
>
>  - Rewrite in D

That was just me thinking out loud because I was browsing the D
website when your e-mail arrived ;)

>  - Lose the reliance on GLib/GObject

I can second that, but only because of personal preference, not
technical merits of GLib/GObject. I just find it a pretty hard and
verbose system :)

>  - Get rid of PangoXSL

That would be really nice too. Don't know what the state of
Cairo/Pango integration is at the moment.

>  - Sack the maintainer

Nooo :)

>  - Be the best DocBook formatter on the planet

Absolutely!

>  - What would it take for xmlroff to become the first thing you load onto=
 your
>    computer after the OS?

For xmlroff to become a darn good init(1) replacement? ;)

>  - What would it take for you to junk your current word processor or
>    formatting system in favour of XSL-FO and xmlroff?

My dad runs a very small publishing company, for which I do some work
from time to time. The project at the moment is a translation from
english to swedish of one of his titles, to be published in early
2007.

There's a pretty well-established way of producing the books here, and
my dad has this guy that he always contracts for cover material and
typesetting, however I have been able push some change into the
company in the past; switching their old NetWare servers over to
Linux, and their commercial firewall to OpenBSD. Maybe in the future
they'd be willing to try producing a book with DocBook or TEI and
XSL-FO.

For that, xmlroff needs to have good font support for True-/OpenType
fonts, and do a good job of automatic hyphenation, maybe using TeX
hyphenation patterns. It also needs to be able to read TIFF graphic
files with embedded ICC color profiles and embed them correctly into
the PDF.

This is just a few thoughts on what would make xmlroff a killer app for me =
:)

>
>  - What would it take for xmlroff to be your tool of choice for formattin=
g
>    XML?

See above. And also, more for personal use, the support of SVG and a
nice API so that I can exploit the power of xmlroff in my own little
stupid applications.

Best regards,
Aron

>
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Re: [xmlroff] What needs to be done to make xmlroff a success?

[Noah S. <ns...@gm...>]

> See above. And also, more for personal use, the support of SVG and a
> nice API so that I can exploit the power of xmlroff in my own little
> stupid applications.

Seconded, big time. SWIG Python binding would be frickin' fantastic.
Right now there are no Python bindings for FO processing at all that I
know of - this would be major.

[xmlroff] libfo basic interface [Was: What needs to be done to make xmlroff a success?]

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

Aron Stansvik <elv...@gm...> writes:
> 2006/1/30, Tony Graham <Ton...@su...>:
...
>>  - What would it take for xmlroff to be your tool of choice for formatting
>>    XML?
>
> See above. And also, more for personal use, the support of SVG and a
> nice API so that I can exploit the power of xmlroff in my own little
> stupid applications.

Have you looked at libfo/fo-libfo-basic.h?

No GObjects in sight.

It's even mostly documented in the xmlroff manual and has an example
'xmlroff-basic.c' program in the 'libfo-examples' package.

Regards,


Tony.

Re: [xmlroff] libfo basic interface [Was: What needs to be done to make xmlroff a success?]

[Aron S. <elv...@gm...>]

2006/1/30, Tony Graham <Ton...@su...>:
> Aron Stansvik <elv...@gm...> writes:
> > 2006/1/30, Tony Graham <Ton...@su...>:
> ...
> >>  - What would it take for xmlroff to be your tool of choice for format=
ting
> >>    XML?
> >
> > See above. And also, more for personal use, the support of SVG and a
> > nice API so that I can exploit the power of xmlroff in my own little
> > stupid applications.
>
> Have you looked at libfo/fo-libfo-basic.h?
>
> No GObjects in sight.
>
> It's even mostly documented in the xmlroff manual and has an example
> 'xmlroff-basic.c' program in the 'libfo-examples' package.

Ah. I don't have a need this very moment to call xmlroff, it was a
feature-wish for a hypothetical need, not an urgent one ;) Now I know
it's there, good to know.

Aron

>
> Regards,
>
>
> Tony.
>
>
>
> -------------------------------------------------------
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>

Re: [xmlroff] What needs to be done to make xmlroff a success?

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

Tony Graham <Ton...@Su...> writes:
> Tony Graham <Ton...@Su...> writes:
> ...
>>    What needs to be done to make xmlroff a success?
...
> I'm just looking for ideas at this point.
> 
>  - What would it take for xmlroff to become the first thing you load onto your
>    computer after the OS?
> 
>  - What would it take for you to junk your current word processor or
>    formatting system in favour of XSL-FO and xmlroff?
> 
>  - What would it take for xmlroff to be your tool of choice for formatting
>    XML?

This is the last (hopefully) list before we act on some of these...

 - Implement...

 - Implement region-before, region-after, etc.

 - Implement markers

 - Implement hyphenation

 - Improve TrueType/OpenType support

 - Provide RPMs as well as SRPMs and .tar.gz downloads

 - Provide a Windows port

 - Provide a Debian port

 - Provide a Solaris port

 - Improve developer documentation

 - Improve end-user documentation

 - Rewrite in a more OO language

 - Rewrite in...

 - Rewrite in D

 - Rewrite in C++

 - Keep it in C

 - Lose the reliance on GLib/GObject

 - Get rid of PangoXSL

 - Sack the maintainer

 - Put the statement of purpose on the xmlroff web page

 - Counteract outdated negative perceptions from when xmlroff used PDFlib

 - Be the best DocBook formatter on the planet

 - Support more graphics formats

 - Support PNG with alpha in PDF

 - Support TIFF with ICC colour profiles in PDF

 - Support SVG graphics

 - Produce output in...

 - Produce output in SVG

 - Document current graphic and output capabilities

 - Integrate with editors

 - Provide one-click formatting from within an editor

 - Provide a SWIG interface for use from scripting languages

 - Replace current JNI interface with SWIG

 - Make an Ant task for running xmlroff from Ant build files

 - Make it easier to add and run tests

 - Put a statement of purpose on the main web page

 - Replace the "Implementation Plan" page on the website

Regards,


Tony.

Re: [xmlroff] What needs to be done to make xmlroff a success?

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

"Gerrit P. Haase" <ge...@fa...> writes:
> - Emacs / Xemacs integration.
> - OpenOffice integration
> - More editor integration (Nedit, ....)
> - Standalone FOP editor with xmlroff integration?
>
> So I could edit a FOP document and with one click I get the PDF.

It sounds like you want Conglomerate: http://www.conglomerate.org/

Regards,


Tony.