The Underscore Archives

We use docbook format for user guides and successfully integrated pdf
generation into the nightly build with XMLMind (http://www.xmlmind.com/).

Ed.

Matt Hamilton wrote:
> Hi all,
>    Its about that time of year again where once again I take a look  
> at our internal processes here at Netsight and think 'We really could  
> do with a tool to automate some of the proposals we put together'.   
> This has been an annual tradition for me now for about 5 years, and  
> normally results in me looking at a myriad of different technologies/ 
> format (eg. docbook, latex, xsl:fo, opendoc, reportlab, plain 'ole  
> xhtml/css, etc) for producing a nicely outputted and styled pdf to  
> send to a client.
>
> This annual event is normally directly following me nearly throwing  
> my laptop across the room trying to get MS Word[*] to stop f^&king up  
> my formatting and numbering.  Inevitably though something else comes  
> up and I never get very far in my dreams, either that or I dream the  
> impossible dream and give up.
>
> I am currently looking again at xsl:fo and Apache's FOP to perhaps  
> generate content into an XML file then apply xsl:fo and get a PDF out  
> of the end.  My main requirements are to be able to create reasonably  
> structured documents (eg. sections, subsections) with tables of  
> content, text flowing, tables etc.
>
> So, any of you out there know of any new, sparkly, whizz-bang systems  
> for doing this that might be for some reason better than the myriad  
> of existing stuff out there?
>
> -Matt
>
> [*] yes I could use OpenOffice/Page/etc, but that still isn't really  
> what I want, I want some method of (maybe through a website) create a  
> document out of a bunch of components and render it.
>
>   

-- 

Edward Ross (Director)
Ross Technologies Limited
Phone: +44 (0)1275 331 912
Fax: +44 (0)845 6800062
http://www.rosstech.biz