Re: What needs to be done to make xmlroff a success?

Aron Stansvik <[email protected]> Mon, 30 Jan 2006 13:07:35 +0100
Newsgroups gmane.text.xml.xmlroff.general
Message-ID <[email protected]>
2006/1/30, Tony Graham <[email protected]>:
> Tony Graham <[email protected]> writes:
> ...
> >    What needs to be done to make xmlroff a success?
>
>  - Rewrite in D

That was just me thinking out loud because I was browsing the D
website when your e-mail arrived ;)

>  - Lose the reliance on GLib/GObject

I can second that, but only because of personal preference, not
technical merits of GLib/GObject. I just find it a pretty hard and
verbose system :)

>  - Get rid of PangoXSL

That would be really nice too. Don't know what the state of
Cairo/Pango integration is at the moment.

>  - Sack the maintainer

Nooo :)

>  - Be the best DocBook formatter on the planet

Absolutely!

>  - What would it take for xmlroff to become the first thing you load onto your
>    computer after the OS?

For xmlroff to become a darn good init(1) replacement? ;)

>  - What would it take for you to junk your current word processor or
>    formatting system in favour of XSL-FO and xmlroff?

My dad runs a very small publishing company, for which I do some work
from time to time. The project at the moment is a translation from
english to swedish of one of his titles, to be published in early
2007.

There's a pretty well-established way of producing the books here, and
my dad has this guy that he always contracts for cover material and
typesetting, however I have been able push some change into the
company in the past; switching their old NetWare servers over to
Linux, and their commercial firewall to OpenBSD. Maybe in the future
they'd be willing to try producing a book with DocBook or TEI and
XSL-FO.

For that, xmlroff needs to have good font support for True-/OpenType
fonts, and do a good job of automatic hyphenation, maybe using TeX
hyphenation patterns. It also needs to be able to read TIFF graphic
files with embedded ICC color profiles and embed them correctly into
the PDF.

This is just a few thoughts on what would make xmlroff a killer app for me :)

>
>  - What would it take for xmlroff to be your tool of choice for formatting
>    XML?

See above. And also, more for personal use, the support of SVG and a
nice API so that I can exploit the power of xmlroff in my own little
stupid applications.

Best regards,
Aron

>
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