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dmazeLast night I rediscovered my ability to sit down and hack on something and actually get engrossed in it. This is something that's been missing at work for a while, so it was kind of nice to find it on a side project. The down side is, I didn't actually get to sleep until 1 or so, and I'm still pretending to be dayshifted...
But, regardless: the XML-to-print toolchain feels much saner than the SGML-to-print toolchain. Maybe it's because XSL:FO and XSL Transformations are actually, say, documented by someone (the W3C). It helps that XML is trendy right now, so there are multiple online tutorials for the tools. And as a consequence of this, there are *gasp* multiple implementations of the tools (mostly the Java path and the not-Java path, but both seem to work well for XML-to-PDF). And, handily, osx will convert SGML to XML, so you don't have to go through the pain of typing out XML if you happen to have a DTD for your document floating around.
But, regardless: the XML-to-print toolchain feels much saner than the SGML-to-print toolchain. Maybe it's because XSL:FO and XSL Transformations are actually, say, documented by someone (the W3C). It helps that XML is trendy right now, so there are multiple online tutorials for the tools. And as a consequence of this, there are *gasp* multiple implementations of the tools (mostly the Java path and the not-Java path, but both seem to work well for XML-to-PDF). And, handily, osx will convert SGML to XML, so you don't have to go through the pain of typing out XML if you happen to have a DTD for your document floating around.
