From: Lyle Johnson <lyle.johnson@...>
Date: 2005-11-13T04:05:07+09:00
Subject: Re: DocBook to PDF

On 11/12/05, Hal Fulton <hal9000@hypermetrics.com> wrote:

> What might be straightforward for you might not be for me.
>
> I don't have any of these tools installed, and I've never heard of
> FOP or FO.
>
> Still my best shot?

I don't remember exactly how I put all the pieces together back when I
was starting to look at this, but it's certainly not because I
actually understand how it all works. ;)

FO stands for "formatting object", and that is literally everything
that I know about it. Seriously. I know that when I process my DocBook
XML documents with Saxon (which is a standalone executable-type
program), it uses some XSL instructions in the DocBook XSL stylesheets
to produce an FO file. Oh, I don't know anything about XSL either, by
the way. I just know that it's a piece of the puzzle. Anyways, I then
can use Apache's FOP program (also a command-line program) to spit out
a PDF.

We can talk about it more offline if you do decide to go this route.
It's mostly a job of downloading the stuff and installing it, though.