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I have a project where I need to take XML and format it as ascii text. Sounds simple right ? But alas the requirements are subtle. It seems people dont do text formatting much anymore. I fondly remember the days of nroff where I could do good text formatting and achieve things like word splitting (hyphenating), justification etc on text content. In particular a challenge is to support multi column tables. Thats right, text spanning 5 columns, that needs to wrap in each column. Oh and do that with 40 column line widths. Piece of cake. Oh and its a Variable width text font ... ha ! What I tried so far which almost works sorta, just enough to not work well enough :) Translate the XML to HTML with XSLT then I downloaded one of the free "HTML to Text" tools which are prevalent on the net. It sorta did work, except for the tables. But I need something that can work in a production environment. Open Source is prefered, but if it does an excellent job then a commercial product could be justified (pun intended). My next attempt will to try Apache FOP. I looked at RenderX but they dont claim text output. Apache FOP claims a text output but with caveots, the claim is its not robust code with poor results. Maybe they are being kind and it really works great. I will try. Any other suggestions ? I can always 'roll my own' but this project is not on the budget yet and were trying to see if we can do something with minimal work. Appreciated, thanks, -- David A. Lee dlee@c... http://www.calldei.com http://www.xmlsh.org 812-482-5224
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