Re: DOCBOOK-APPS: PassiveTex improvement project

[Johannes Zellner <johannes at zellner dot org>]

On Wed, Jun 19, 2002 at 10:17:45AM -0700, Bob Stayton wrote:
> Do you use PassiveTex, and do you have suggestions
> for things that need fixing in it?
> 
> I've been in correspendence with Sebastian Rahtz,
> the author of PassiveTex, which converts XSLFO files
> to PDF.  Sebastian is open to suggestions for
> improvements, but he doesn't want 10,000 (10 million?)
> DocBook users descending on him.  I suggested that
> I could act as a conduit from the docbook-apps list to 
> help form a development plan for PassiveTex improvements.
> If you post your suggestions to either this list
> or directly to me, I'll assemble them for review on
> docbook-apps and then send them to Sebastian.
> 
> So, what are the glitches that prevent you from
> putting PassiveTex into production for high quality
> PDF output?

simple: it's /hard/ to install. Or in other words: I didn't manage
to install it.

I followed closely the instructions given in index.html.
This is what I get, when I try to translate teiu5.fo:

# pdflatex -fmt=pdfxmltex -progname=pdfxmltex teiu5.fo

This is pdfTeX, Version 3.14159-1.00a-pretest-20011114-ojmw (Web2C 7.3.7)
(/home/joze/tex/inputs/passivetex/test/teiu5.fo{/usr/share/texmf/pdftex/config/
pdftex.cfg}
LaTeX2e <2001/06/01>
Babel <v3.7h> and hyphenation patterns for american, french, german, ngerman, n
ohyphenation, loaded.
xmltex version: 2000-03-08 v0.14 DPC
(/home/joze/tex/inputs/xmltex/xmltex.cfg)
No File: teiu5.cfg
 xmlns:fo = 5
URI: 6 = http://www.tug.org/fotex
 xmlns:fotex = 6
 <5:root (/home/joze/tex/inputs/passivetex/fotex.xmt
 xmlns:fotex = 6
 xmlns:fo = 5
 </0:>
 Grabbed content
 End Grabbed content
 </0:>
 Grabbed content
 End Grabbed content
 </0:>
 Grabbed content
 End Grabbed content
 </0:>
 Grabbed content
 End Grabbed content
 </0:>
 Grabbed content
 End Grabbed content
 </0:>
 Grabbed content
 End Grabbed content
! Undefined control sequence.
l.29 \XMLstringX
                \prop@width<>proportional-column-width(1)</>
? x


I'd use it, if I could install it!

-- 
   Johannes