XSL-FO Chef's Tools Exhibition
- Where: at XML 2003, Philadelphia, PA
- What: a technical exhibition of XSL-FO tools
- Who: one representative for each FO product or product group was invited.
- Why: To display the variety of XSL-FO tools, demonstrating how many
of them there are and highlighting the strengths of each.
- What: Each participant was asked to:
- provide information about their product(s) according
to a questionnaire
- provide a sample instance, which will be shared
with all other participants
- endeavor to render the sample instance as best they
can
- render the sample instances provided by each of the
participants
- disclose what extensions, if any, they use in doing
the above
Organizer's Comments - B. Tommie Usdin
As far as I know, this was the first public demonstration of interchange of
typesetting files. I was quite impressed, both by the willingness of the many
vendors to participate and by the quality of the interchange that was demonstrated.
The participants received only XSL-FO instances, without any guidance on what the
formatted documents should look like, and each formatted as many of them as they
could. Not surprisingly, most vendors sent samples that displayed the strengths of
their products; and some of the vendors could not render some of the samples. In
fact, none of the tools "succeeded" with all of the samples, and some of then
required considerable manipulation of the documents before they could be rendered at all.
The instances were modified for two main reasons:
- The FO instance was invalid, or in some way defective. Several of the
participants found infelicities in the documents supplied by other participants, and
corrected them.
- The instance called for a feature that was not supported by the participant's tool, or in some other way stressed the tool being demonstrated.
In either case, participants were told that they were permitted to modify the documents, provided they described the modifications they made. Most not only described the modifications, they also provided the modified FO files they produced.
Conclusions: At the end of a very exciting demonstration of XSL-FO rendering tools I believe that we have demonstrated:
- XSL-FO rendering is practical for many applications
-
There are a variety of high-qality XSL-FO tools available
-
Each of the available tools has strengths and weaknesses; none is clearly
superior to all all others for all uses
- To selected an appropriate XSL-FO rendering engine, users must consider what
they want the tool to do, and select a tool that has those capabilities. For example,
some tools are capable of formatting very large files; some are not. Some are comfortable
with highly nested structures, some are not. And the tools vary considerably in their
abilities to handle floating objects, keeps, and other typographic complexity.
Rendered samples from:
- Antenna House XSL Formatter (Antenna House, Inc.)
- Adobe Document Server 6.0 (Adobe Systems, Inc.)
- Scriptura (Inventive Designers NV)
- Xinc (Lunasil Ltd)
- Apoc XSL-FO (chive software)
- RenderX XEP
- IBM
- xmlroff (http://xmlroff.sourceforge.net/)
Information (but no rendered samples) from:
- 3b2-FO (Advent 3B2 Inc.)
The original documents, as supplied to the participants: