On Mon, November 4, 2013 3:48 pm, Wayne Brisette wrote:
> From: Tony Graham <tgraham@xxxxxxxxxx>
>
>> It's one of those things where the answer if different for different
>> people.  I've had more approaches for XSL-FO work in the last 18 months
>> than in any similar period previously, so, yes, it's working for many
>> people,
>
> I suspect (and maybe you can confirm this Tony) that the reason you are
> seeing an uptick in work is due to companies moving away from the
> traditional publishing (FrameMaker, MS-Word) and moving more into
> XML-based authoring environments such as DocBook and DITA. That being

I don't always know, since sometimes I'm already busy and it doesn't get
beyond the initial approach, but I've also go work from people using JATS.

> said, those of us in that business find ourselves having to reach out
> more and more to programmers and consultants to do things we use to do
> ourselves, so there certainly is a level of frustration in our business

What technology did you use to 'do ourselves'?

I'm afraid you haven't given any details about what your business is.

> we haven't had in quite some time. I for one keep looking at more
> traditional CSS options only because, as mentioned here, finding

Describing CSS as 'traditional' is interesting since a one-time title for
September's "Publishing and the Open Web Platform" workshop [1] that you
can still see in the <title> is "The New Publishing - A W3C Workshop on
the Open Web Platform and the Traditional Print Publishing Industry".

> somebody who has css experience is easier and a lot of times you have
> that experience within a company. However, with the exception of
> MadCap's Flare product, which we're not using (not sure what engine they
> licensed, but it uses CSS) nearly all the PDF publishing systems are
> using XSLT/XSL-FO for building PDFs.

I was interested to see at the Paris workshop how many people were using
XSL-FO, though for the ones invited to speak, it really was 'were' in the
past tense.

What would it take to make XSL-FO easier to use for publishers?

Regards,


Tony Graham                                   tgraham@xxxxxxxxxx
Consultant                                 http://www.mentea.net
Mentea       13 Kelly's Bay Beach, Skerries, Co. Dublin, Ireland
 --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --
    XML, XSL-FO and XSLT consulting, training and programming
       Chair, Print and Page Layout Community Group @ W3C

[1] http://www.w3.org/2012/12/global-publisher/Overview.html