Frame versus XSL-FO

[Scott Prentice]

Hi Ed...

Yes .. the cost is definitely related to the complexity. If you have FO 
developers in-house, that will help a lot. The key is that you need a 
solid understanding of XSLT, plus you need to fully understand page 
layout concepts, and on top of that the FO language itself is huge and 
complex. If you want to learn FO, I highly recommend finding a way to 
take Ken Holman's class "Practical Formatting Using XSL-FO" (see 
http://www.cranesoftwrights.com/). This will give you a good solid base 
from which to start.

A lot of XSLT developers think that they can also do FO development. 
That's where you run into trouble. There's a lot more involved.

However .. regardless of your ability to create and maintain FO 
stylesheets, you can never achieve the same level of formatting with FO 
that you get from FM. You can get close, and if close is good enough 
(along with other benefits of FO), then FO can be a good solution.

Cheers,

...scott


On 2/27/13 12:12 PM, Ed Nodland wrote:
> These are good inputs.
>
> The "site:" for searching was new to me.  Thanks
>
> I think I will stay with Framemaker and upgrade to version 11.  I hope 
> Adobe improves the stability and UI issues as time goes on.
>
> I am curious if the high cost of XSL-FO development is due to FO being 
> more difficult then basic XSLT.  We program many XSLTs, some are 
> complex that merge data from multiple XML files that contain coded 
> data in tables, tables of descriptions of the coded data, header data, 
> etc.  XSLT becomes a powerful programming language for text processing 
> if it is written recursively like the old LISP language.  I agree this 
> can be daunting, but maybe I could eat FO for breakfast.  I'll have to 
> looking to it further when due dates don't get in my way.
>
>
> On Wed, Feb 27, 2013 at 11:19 AM, Combs, Richard 
> <richard.combs at polycom.com <mailto:richard.combs at polycom.com>> wrote:
>
>     Harro de Jong wrote:
>
>     > > Also, I could not find the search capability on frameusers.com
>     <http://frameusers.com> to search
>     > older topics
>     > > by keyword other then the archive that looks like something
>     out of the 90's.
>     >  Am I
>     > > missing some capability somewhere?
>     >
>     >
>     > I use the search at
>     > <
>     http://www.mail-archive.com/framers@lists.frameusers.com/info.html>
>
>     I use Google: <search term> site:frameusers.com
>     <http://frameusers.com>
>
>     Richard G. Combs
>     Senior Technical Writer
>     Polycom, Inc.
>     richardDOTcombs AT polycomDOTcom
>     303-223-5111 <tel:303-223-5111>
>     ------
>     rgcombs AT gmailDOTcom
>     303-903-6372 <tel:303-903-6372>
>     ------
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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