Article:		Printing XML: Why CSS Is Better than XSL
Subject:		very simple case and unanswered questions
Date:		2005-01-20 12:52:39
From:		smckenzie
Your PDF output looks fine but there are some problems I didn't see addressed. First, just *how* do you get your output to pdf? I've seen some tools that will create pdf out of HTML that will support CSS, but they are rare and mostly broken. They also tend to be stand alone Windows apps and not scriptable. Second, how would you publish multiple XML documents to a single book? Is there a way to automaticly generate a TOC or an index? Is there a way to organize content based on alphabetical sorting? Most FO processors have extensions to automate PDF bookmarks, how would you handle that? Can you do callouts, keep a section title on the same page as the related content, format alternating margins for even and odd pages so there is extra space on the spine, etc? I think you might want to qualify the article that it is superior for printing a single web page to a printer from a browser, or maybe show some real typsetting features other than page size.

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• use your browser
  2005-01-29 10:43:43 alexkli [Reply]
  
  You can try to use your favorite CSS-enabled browser to print it and pass it to a pdf writer (Adobe Distiller or FreePDF or whatever).

  
  I don't know how it works for all kinds of XML files, but the Mozilla ones actually support print-CSS.
  
  

• very simple case and unanswered questions
  2005-01-20 13:08:10 howcom [Reply]
  
  We have used Prince to generate the PDF document. You can download an alpha version of Prince which has the WebArch document included in it from www.yeslogic.com

  
  Prince reads a single file, but you can use some tricks (e.g. entities) to include other content. When Bert and I wrote the CSS book, we had one file per chapter and concatinated them into one before formatting.

  
  The size of the article limits the number of typesetting features we can describe -- what are you missing?