Re: Alternatives for reST -> PDF

Diego Essaya wrote:

> 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).

The tool support is the problem indeed.

(La)TeX code looks really ugly IMO, but LaTeX is the only free system
that does actual typesetting, not just text rendering.  We aren't using
LaTeX because we like it, but because it's the only tool out there.
(Well, there may be other TeX-derivatives, but LaTeX seems to be the
most powerful one for general-purpose typesetting.)

Prince's samples look better than Firefox's print output for sure, but
it doesn't even come close to the quality of LaTeX's output.  Not in
math, not in anything else -- hyphenation, margins, font combinations,
kerning, ligatures, etc.

> Using this approach, rst2pdf could just produce an XML or XHTML and
> then convert it to PDF using a standard or custom CSS stylesheet.

Yes, but why wouldn't you want to go via LaTeX instead of via XHTML?
Especially if LaTeX's quality is so much better?

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