Frame versus XSL-FO
Yves Barbion
yves.barbion at gmail.com
Wed Feb 27 01:07:59 PST 2013
Hi Ed
I'm not sure whether the DITA community is leaning towards XSL-FO. Yes,
oXygen XML Author/Editor is an excellent DITA editor, but I fully agree
with Scott: XSL-FO is complicated and expensive. The main reason why people
TRY to use XSL-FO to generate PDFs from DITA-sourced content is because the
FREE DITA Open Toolkit uses XSL-FO (with FREE FOP). Indeed, the DITA-OT is
*FREE* (that's what people see), but it serves as a REFERENCE
IMPLEMENTATION (and that's people often don't see). This means that the
DITA-OT is a starting point; it is not a ready-to-use product which gives
you high-quality output "out of the box".
Developing XSL-FO stylesheets means... development work, and this is where
"free" becomes expensive. A single XSL-FO stylesheet for a publication can
easily cost $10,000, exclusive of translations, modifications etc.
Also, keep in mind that multiple stylesheets may be required for a single
"publication", for example:
- A stylesheet for the table of contents
- A stylesheet for the preface
- A stylesheet for the parts or chapters in a book
- A stylesheet for an appendix
- A style for an index
These can easily be created (and updated) with FrameMaker+DITA-FMx.
Here are some examples of PDFs generated from DITA-sourced content:
- Generated by our customer, using XSL-FO (FOP):
http://help.esko.com/docs/en-us/suite-general/12/installationguide/Engines_12_InstallationGuide_EN.pdf
- Generated by ourselves using DITA-FMx:
http://www.adit.ws/nomadesk/help/help-manual.pdf
If you want to see how the PDFs are generated with DITA-FMx, check out
these screencasts on YouTube: http://goo.gl/BevKm
Finally, apart from XSL-FO and FrameMaker, you could also use DITA2Go to
generate PDFs from DITA-sourced content (via Word): www.dita2go.com
Cheers
--
Yves Barbion
www.scripto.nu
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.frameusers.com/pipermail/framers-frameusers.com/attachments/20130227/1c10af36/attachment.htm>
More information about the framers
mailing list