Re: [Groff] Lack of quality print output from DocBook

[Werner LEMBERG]

> > Mhmm.  I have yet to see a DocBook output which looks decent (in
> > the sense of good typography) without postprocessing.  Maybe I've
> > seen only bad examples so far -- can you point me to something?
> 
> If you mean Postscript/PDF output:
> 
>   Unicode Explained (Jukka K. Korpela)
>   http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/unicode/
> 
> The source for that book was written in DocBook, and the open-source
> DocBook Project stylesheets were used to generate the XSL-FO output
> from which the Postscript for it was made.

Well, yes, but I wonder how much hand-editing has been done?  This is,
the document has been written, and you are going to fine-tune the
appearance for a particular device (avoiding orphans here, increasing
the page height by one line there, etc., etc.), then where does this
information get stored?  I doubt that XSL-FO is more intelligent than
LaTeX, so you have to adjust the pages in a typographical manner
similar to it.  In a LaTeX document, I can store this data within the
source file.  What about DocBook?

> That said, I don't think an open-source XSL-FO engine was used to
> generate the Postscript output.

This is very sad.


    Werner