Re: Perl Typesetting

We need only a few simple, structural elements and one most readable font family.

I agree, but these are easy things, so they should be easy to implement, right? Sometimes, they are not. See the examples I gave.

When you're up for individual, high quality design however, you will need specialized tools that let you do the design, not the markup (thinking of QuarkXpress, Freehand, Photoshop etc.)

However, these tools defy automatization. Sure, Photoshop has it's own scripts, but it cannot be scripted from outside, using e.g. perl. LaTeX is used a lot these days to generate documents that need to use a certain fixed layout. For example, think of generating a couple hundred PDF spec sheets for products out of a database.

Tools like LaTeX are not suitable for one-page, "screaming ad"-like design. They are meant for designs that are reused (like in a thesis). And that is where I think we need a tool that doesn't suck.

Comment on Re: Perl Typesetting

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Re: Re: Perl Typesetting by Django (Pilgrim) on Aug 30, 2002 at 07:19 UTC
For example, think of generating a couple hundred PDF spec sheets for products out of a database. I think XML to PDF is a good approach to that. I've done that with XSLT and FO ("Formatting Objects"), using Resin and Apaches FOP. The W3 specs for FO are exactly what you need when formatting for print, but unfortunately some essentials are not supported by the current FOP implementation. So it's still impossible to make your PDFs look really good with FOP. I don't know about the alternatives in perl, but I'd rather help improving existing tools, than trying to develop another incomplete solution from scratch. ^~Django "Why don't we ever challenge the spherical earth theory?"	[reply]

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Re: Re: Perl Typesetting
by Django (Pilgrim) on Aug 30, 2002 at 07:19 UTC

For example, think of generating a couple hundred PDF spec sheets for products out of a database.

I think XML to PDF is a good approach to that. I've done that with XSLT and FO ("Formatting Objects"), using Resin and Apaches FOP. The W3 specs for FO are exactly what you need when formatting for print, but unfortunately some essentials are not supported by the current FOP implementation. So it's still impossible to make your PDFs look really good with FOP. I don't know about the alternatives in perl, but I'd rather help improving existing tools, than trying to develop another incomplete solution from scratch.

^~Django

"Why don't we ever challenge the spherical earth theory?"

[reply]