Re: Re: Alternatives for reST -> PDF

Hi all,

I just wanted to add my thoughts about this subject. I recently
subscribed to the list; this is why I am replying to Felix's mail and
not the first one in the thread.

I totally agree, pdflatex has lots of drawbacks. Right now it may be
the best tool available for PDF conversion, but it would be great if
there was a more convenient way.

The funny thing is that I realized this situation on my own some days
ago. I started to do some research and came to the same conclusions
that were expressed in this thread. Today I found the thread in the
archives, and I was surprised when I saw Ben's mail, since he
expressed the very same issues that I have with (La)TeX.

I have a feeling that "The Right Thing (TM)" would be to rely on CSS
Print Profile[1], or better yet, on CSS3 Paged Media Module[2].
Unfortunately, I don't think there is any free tool implementing this
(Prince[3] is a non-free alternative).

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/css-print/
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-page/
[3] http://www.princexml.com/

Using this approach, rst2pdf could just produce an XML or XHTML and
then convert it to PDF using a standard or custom CSS stylesheet. Or,
one could just generate a single XHTML and use separate stylesheets
for showing on screen and printing.

The drawbacks are:

1. These CSS extensions are W3C Candidate Recommendations. They are
not standard yet, and I don't know if they will ever be.
2. As I have said, support for CSSPP is very basic in browsers, and
nonexistant in other free tools.
3. It is very hard to get the same quality that LaTeX provides,
especially for math. Prince provides a sample PDF[4] with math
expressions described in XML. Compare it with any LaTeX article.

[4] http://www.princexml.com/samples/math.pdf

Just my two cents. I've been using LaTeX for a while, I recently
discovered ReST and I think that a simple and functional rst2pdf would
just kick ass ;)

Regards,
Diego Essaya

On 5/14/06, Felix Wiemann <Felix.Wiemann <at> gmx.net> wrote:
>  David Goodger wrote:
>
> > Martin Blais wrote:
> >
> >> Another issue: I talked to Dave about it, multiple times, and he's
> >> quite hung-up on not including this tool [rst2pdf.py] in the standard
> >> docutils tools, for some reason (I can't remember which).  Dave?
> >
> > I can't remember either.
>
> Well, I think it was me who objected.  The problem is that such a tool
> is too fragile.  I don't dare committing to making this tool work for
> all kinds of edge-cases (dependent files, etc.).
>
> Anyway, people will still have to know what they're doing (having
> pdflatex in the $PATH [often not the case on Windows, I guess], and
> deciding whether to run pdflatex one, two, or three times).  So the
> promise of "just converting reST to PDF" won't work anyway, people still
> have to understand how to use pdflatex.

-------------------------------------------------------
Using Tomcat but need to do more? Need to support web services, security?
Get stuff done quickly with pre-integrated technology to make your job easier
Download IBM WebSphere Application Server v.1.0.1 based on Apache Geronimo
http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid0709&bid&3057&dat1642