groff-based FO processor

Steve Cheng <[email protected]> writes:

> Finally, as for the groff XSL-FO translator:
> I haven't worked on that project for much of last year.
> Unfortunately, the lack of interest from others has not been a good
> motivator for this project.
> And it's certainly not easy, because I have not thoroughly
> digested the huge FO specification, and probably have forgotten
> much of it from the time I stopped working on it to now.  It's
> not quite dead yet, since I do have the sources to what I was
> developing, and I still think a groff-based FO processor would
> be useful. I may just revive it on impulse, if I need to get
> print output for my XML documents. Let's just say that I'm
> putting the project on hold for now.

I wonder if any further time you might put into the groff-based
FO processor might be better spent contributing to work on some
other existing solutions for generating print/PDF output from
XSL-FO. In particular, xmlroff -

  http://xmlroff.sourceforge.net/

I don't know if you're familiar with it already, but despite the
name, it has nothing to do with roff. Instead it uses the GNOME
print library, and the Pango library, which is a truly modern and
fully internationalized system for text handling -- something
that the fundamental design limitations in groff prevent groff
from ever becoming.

xmlroff is soundly designed and just needs some hard work put
into from skilled C coders to add support for processing XSL-FO
structures that it does not yet support.

  --Mike