From: Devin Mullins <twifkak@...>
Date: 2005-11-13T04:12:11+09:00
Subject: Re: DocBook to PDF

Hal Fulton wrote:

> Keith Fahlgren wrote:
>
>> On Sat, 12 Nov 2005, Hal Fulton wrote:
>>
>>
>> Does this need to be a pure Ruby solution? If not, I'd suggest using 
>> (or adapting) the standard DocBook stylesheets 
>> (http://wiki.docbook.org/topic/DocBookXslStylesheets), and using
>> (perhaps via the Ruby libxslt bindings) those to generate XSL-FO, 
>> which you can
>> then feed into FOP (http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/) or the FO 
>> formatter
>> of your choice.
>
>
> That sounds tedious and error-prone to me -- I don't normally use any
> of this stuff. And I don't even know what FO is.

XSL-FO is a W3C standard, a product of the XSL working group (the same 
people who put out XSLT, the language for converting XML documents). 
XSL-FO is an intermediary XML language for represented "formatted 
objects" (rich text documents). Many tools exist to convert XSL-FO files 
(documents) into PDF, PNG, etc. Apache FOP is the popular Java one, but 
you don't need to know Java to use it. It has a command line interface 
whereby you feed it the filename of an XSL-FO file and the filename of 
your desired PDF file.

Capisce?

Devin
(Tedious? Error-prone? It's a W3C XML standard, so, probably. But, 
luckily, you don't have to write any of that crap -- just use it.)