RE: Identity-H encoding in PDFs on Linux?

["Peter Ring" <pri@xxxxxx>]

You hit a sore point ;) Of course, Linux users appreciate the availability
of an Acrobat Reader for Linux. But, except from the Acrobat Reader, Adobe
seems to be somewhat removed from the Linux market.

Someone else will fill the vacant lot.

For office document processing, OpenOffice.org/StarOffice is perfectly
suitable.

And for technical documentation (or legal publishing), it's already
perfectly feasible to put up a powerful tool chain on Linux. A growing
number of people routinely use emacs+psgml or other XML text editors to edit
e.g. DocBook XML source files [1]. A variety of output formats can be
produced from XML source documents, using XSL stylesheets [2]. For PDF
output, commercial XSL-FO renderers such as XEP [3] or XSL Formatter [4] are
currently better than freely available Apache FOP [5] or PassiveTeX [6].

There's still a place for FrameMaker in this tool chain. XSL stylesheets are
as arcane as FOSI out specs or DL Pager formats, and it's quite difficult to
achieve e.g. a decent index. If you want to be able to do a little
last-minute tweaking, Advent 3B2 is about the only real alternative to
FrameMaker (and is availbale for Linux).

There are several ways to get from XML to a FrameMaker document. The obvious
one is through a FrameMaker EDD and read/write rules, but the language
available in the EDD is somewhat restricted, so you might need some FDK
client development (i.e., C programming). Another route is through MIF
files; these can be produced in any way you fancy, but require a good
understanding of the internal structure of FrameMaker documents.

[1] http://www.docbook.org/wiki/moin.cgi/DocBookAuthoringTools
[2] http://docbook.sourceforge.net/release/xsl/current/doc/
[3] http://www.renderx.com/
[4] http://www.antennahouse.com/
[5] http://xml.apache.org/fop/
[6] http://www.tei-c.org.uk/Software/passivetex/


kind regards

Peter Ring


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-framers@omsys.com [mailto:owner-framers@omsys.com]On Behalf
Of Dov Isaacs
Sent: 12. maj 2003 03:57
To: Peter Ring
Cc: framers@frameusers.com; framers@omsys.com
Subject: RE: Identity-H encoding in PDFs on Linux?


Peter,

I am sorry if you took my response to be any type of "attack" on
Linux or users of same. My "software socialist" reference was a
tongue-in-cheek reference to the small minority of users who
seem to believe that it is somehow sinful to pay for software or
intellectual property (unless it's their own product that is being
sold) or even use any product that isn't open source or otherwise
free. Clearly, I don't consider IBM as a "software socialist."

<snip />


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