Re: About XMLmind XSL-FO Converter and the DocBook XSLT stylesheets

David C. wrote:
>
> I am working on creating both PDF and Word from DocBook for some very
> large documents (some are thousands of pages) which contain some
> very large tables.

This large DITA document (1200 pages) containing hundreds of tables has 
been generated using XMLmind XSL-FO Converter and our own, in-house, 
DITA stylesheets:

http://www.xmlmind.com/ditac/_dita_spec/dita-1.2-specification.docx

Please take a look at the notes about the memory consumption of XMLmind 
XSL-FO Converter which are found at the bottom of the following page:

http://www.xmlmind.com/ditac/dita_spec.shtml




>
> I currently use the DocBook stylesheets to produce HTML and XSL-FO, and
> RenderX XEP to make PDF from the XSL-FO, and this works well except that there
> is no (direct) means to create Word files, and there are some
> limitations in the tagged PDF with respect to searchability of
> phrases spanning lines in tables.
>
> Accordingly, I am interested in trying your XSL-FO Converter.
>
> I use a Mac, and need a command line utility that can be included
> in a batch processing pipeline, so I expect that the Java Desktop
> edition is what I need.

You can use:

* XMLmind XSL Utility, a handy graphical application, which is also 
usable as a command-line utility 
(http://www.xmlmind.com/foconverter/_distrib/xslutil/doc/help/running.html#command_line).

OR

* Low-level command-line tool fo2docx, which could be invoked by your 
shell scripts in order to convert the XSL-FO file created by the DocBook 
stylesheets to DOCX.

Description of the above programs:

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

Download Evaluation Edition of any of the above programs:

http://www.xmlmind.com/foconverter/downloadeval.shtml

The .zip distribution should work fine on the Mac.



>
> Before buying it, I would like to try it to assure myself that it
> a) works with my large documents, and b) creates PDF and Word files
> that have the features that I want and look OK.

1) Do not be surprised, but Evaluation Edition generates random 
duplicate letters in the output documents. See the "About Evaluation 
Edition" note in http://www.xmlmind.com/foconverter/downloadeval.shtml

2) We have modified the stock DocBook stylesheets in order to use some 
but not all of our XSL-FO extensions[*]. The modified[**] DocBook 
stylesheets are included in the XMLmind XSL Utility distribution.

The stock DocBook stylesheets should work as is with XMLmind XSL-FO 
Converter, but some parts of the generated document (e.g. the TOC) will 
*not* look good.

If you intend to use stock DocBook stylesheets, then this will probably 
be a show stopper.

Example of .docx file generated using our modified DocBook stylesheets 
and XMLmind XSL-FO Converter:

http://www.xmlmind.com/foconverter/_distrib/doc/user/userguide.docx



---
[*] For example, we have used xfc:tab-position, xfc:tab-align to 
properly render fo:leaders, but not xfc:outline-level to render the 
title of chapters and sections.

Please remember that the DocBook stylesheets are not our work and for 
this reason, we haven't invested much time to adapt them to our product.

More information in:

http://www.xmlmind.com/foconverter/_distrib/doc/user/implementation.html#leaders

[**] 
<XSLUtil_install_dir>/addon/config/docbook/xsl/CHANGES_MADE_BY_XMLMIND.txt 
file lists our changes.

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