RE: xsl-fo designer (tool)

["Broberg, Mats" <mats -dot- broberg -at- flir -dot- se>]

>What problems did you encounter with FOP, what makes you say it is not
ready for 
>production? Do you find that pdf documents produced with xsl-fo have
the same quality as 
>documents produced with, let's say, Framemaker?
>
>Does anyone else has an opinion on these products?

France,

I have only experience from using XEP from RenderX, but am quite
impressed so far.

http://www.renderx.com

I use XEP to do batch-composition of all technical manuals for end-users
here at FLIR, which means about 15 different languages (several SE Asian
languages), 120-150 manuals at a time, and 4-6 complete revisions per
year. Each manual is about 150-250 pages long and A5 format (148 x 210
mm / 5.83 x 8.27"). A complete lights-out, non-operator-intervened
batch-composition cycle takes 2-3 hours for 120-150 manuals.

Ofcourse, there is still a small price you pay for using a XSL-FO
formatter. The price is an appearance that is perhaps slightly less
perfect that if you spend a few hours on each manual in Framemaker,
tweaking things like keeps & breaks, hyphenation & justification etc.
However, for me I feel that price is extremely low in comparison to what
I get instead. Furthermore, RenderX issues new versions of XEP quite
often, which means that more and more features in XSL-FO will be
supported. There are also groups lobbying for extensions to XSL-FO,
which would make the standard even more powerful (table continuation
messages etc.)

I'd be happy to send you a few sample pages. Just drop me a line.

Best regards,
Mats Broberg

FLIR Systems AB

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