Re: Word Doc Creation

J. Knisley wrote:
> We’re interested in using your “XMLmind XSL-FO Converter” product for
> one of our customer implementations. We’ve already done some preliminary
> testing with your trial/personal version online and really liked the
> results.
>
> I was curious if you already have a command line version of the
> converter…that can take an .fo file to output a word document? If you
> don’t we would plan to use your .net library to create our own.

Of course, we have fo2rtf.exe, fo2docx.exe, fo2odt.exe, etc. See 
http://www.xmlmind.com/foconverter/_distrib/doc/dotnet/user/command_line_dotnet.html

You'll find these command-line utilities in this distribution:
http://www.xmlmind.net/foconverter/_download/xfc_perso_dotnet-4_6_0.zip



>
> Our customer created all of their documents as “Apache FOP” XSL-FO
> files.

Well, we ourselves write a lot of XSLT stylesheets which generate 
XSL-FO. And we never, ever, target a specific XSL-FO processor when we 
do this.

Instead we refer to this standard (XSL 1.0 and not XSL 1.1)

http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/REC-xsl-20011015/

and then, we test our work against RenderX XEP, Apache FOP and XMLmind 
XSL-FO Converter. (We would love to do the same with Antenna House but 
we don't have it yet.)

We have found mandatory to pass a fo-processor parameter (with "XEP", 
"FOP" and "XFC" as its value) to our XSLT stylesheets because *all* 
XSL-FO processors have their limitations.

Example: FOP does not support automatic layout for tables, which is 
*very* annoying.

Example: XFC has serious limitations with borders outside tables.

Example: XEP has a problem with vertical spacing which makes it quite 
hard to have lists containing paragraphs look good.




> I’m interested in any tips you may have to reduce the amount of
> time we may need to take to ensure the documents look good when run
> through the “XMLmind XSL-FO Converter”. We did have to do some work to
> make sure the documents looked good when run through either Apache FOP
> or your word converter.
>

As explained above, we don't have any special tip other than not design 
an XSLT stylesheet for a specific XSL-FO processor.

However, from time to time, we have to refer to

http://www.xmlmind.com/foconverter/conformance.html

avoid loosing our time with XFC. Yes, even us, we have to do that!
 
--
XMLmind FO Converter Support List
[email protected]
http://www.xmlmind.com/mailman/listinfo/xfc-support