> On Wed, Sep 03, 2003 at 08:01:18AM -0700,
> Bob Stayton <> wrote
> a message of 37 lines which said:
>
> > The other aspect is whether the tools will produce the
> > quality of output your need. Keep in mind that
> > there are other FO processors that do a better job
> > than the free processors PassiveTeX and FOP.
>
> You can produce PDF from DocBook without FO. I still use jade +
> pdfjadetex, which does not require non-free tools (Java JRE) and works
> better than PassiveTeX.
My impression is that while *jade is a good tool, xsl is much better supported
than dsssl now. Both toolsets have bugs, but the xsl-based one is more likely
to get better with time. Java JRE is a free tool, by the way. As free as TeX.
On the other hand, the problems the original author mentions are not solved by using jadetex
instead of passivetex; many of them are inherent to the idea of batch formatting.
However, keeping the limitations in mind, one can produce very well-looking documents;
current implementations (AntennaHouse, RenderX) do have shortcomings, but the shortcomings
are not in the overall rendering capabilities, but in neat things, such as kerning, global
line-breaking optimization and rendering heuristics.
Overall, the quality is quite good.
And will definitely get better with time.
David Tolpin
http://davidashen.net/
