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Sep. 1st, 2002 09:07 pmThe printer is set up as described previously, but my iBook can't talk to it, which makes me sad. I'm sure this is rectifiable, but my housemates have left for an unknown amount of time and I have no root access to any of the Unix boxen, so I can't muck with the CUPS server. Had I a USB cable I could just connect to the thing directory, but I do not have a USB cable. I mean, I probably do, but who knows where it could be? Well, there are reasonable places where past self might have placed one, but they hold none. I discover that I own a large number of ADB and Mac serial cables from the elder days.
I'm really chomping at the bit to rip into this book all hard(copy|core), seriously. Nrr. Well. I guess I'll just turn what I have into HTML and haul myself over to the Diesel and just start reading it that way, typing notes into a separate window, or writing in a notebook. It's OK, since I predict a lot of my comments will take the form of whole sections I need to write and drop into place over the coming week. Don't need inline scribblability for that.
I would like to make a PDF of it, but FOP seems to remain (six months after the last time I looked) the only freely available XSL-FO to PDF conversion tool, and it hasn't advanced in version since the start of this year. This makes me sad, because I have found FOP a very slow and clunky tool. Today I successfully used it to transform a one-page test document in a few minutes, but when fed my manuscript, it ruminates for three hours (the time it takes me to go downtown, buy some shirts, and come back) without a shred of output. I rate this as Unusable.
Turning DocBook XML into XSL-FO is easy; one can use any XSLT processor (and there are lots of these) with the SourceForge DocBook project's own stylesheets, and there you have it. Why isn't turning this XSL-FO into PDF, which in theory would be a more commonly desired transformation, just as easy? Do people only use XSLT for turning XML into HTML, and don't care enough about any of its other potentials to encourage development of XSL-FO transformation tools? I don't know right now. I certainly hope not, since I am hoping to bless Duck with an export-to-PDF option, but nothing I've found so far seems an adequate framework for it.
(Observation: it's almost assuredly more difficult to write XSL-FO-to-whatever software than anything you can do with XSLT, since it involves taking nice, clean, predictable XML and turning it into some other arbitrary and exception-prone file format. So, I bet this has something to do with it.)
All that said, I spied a new XSL-FO ORA book the last time I was in the office. Maybe I'll try to nick me a copy. I hope I don't end up having to code my own XSL-FO-handling libraries, but... we'll see.
Yes, more thought of big projects to do, even in the midst of all this. It has occurred to me that it's coming up on my second anniversary as a Rsdnt. of the Cmmnwlth. of Msschstts. (moved here Halloween 2000) and during this time I've accomplished one all-my-own personal project, which was ComicsML and its attendant essay. (And don't even ask where that is right now. I consider it no longer an active project but mere food for thought (not that you'd know it by reading its web page or anything). However, a colleague has expressed interest in taking it over as a project again, and I find this interesting enough that I'll tend to it once this whole load is offa me.) Right after that I got involved in book writing, and (modulo a few O'Reilly Network articles and weblog entries that got me some positive attention) this is all I've done. Now, more than anything, I just want to cut loose again, pursue my own interests, get back into the business of building strange and wonderful things, unable (and unwilling) to predict what I'll work on from one month to the next. I used to do this constantly back in Maine -- all the cruft on jmac.org is testament to this -- and to do this in the context I've built since 2000, with all the communities I've found and places I've been and, yes, books I've written, well. Speaking as my own biggest fan, I can't wait to see what I'll do.
"Oh, The Places You'll Go," smirks M when I get on this topic.
She doesn't know the half of it.
I'm really chomping at the bit to rip into this book all hard(copy|core), seriously. Nrr. Well. I guess I'll just turn what I have into HTML and haul myself over to the Diesel and just start reading it that way, typing notes into a separate window, or writing in a notebook. It's OK, since I predict a lot of my comments will take the form of whole sections I need to write and drop into place over the coming week. Don't need inline scribblability for that.
I would like to make a PDF of it, but FOP seems to remain (six months after the last time I looked) the only freely available XSL-FO to PDF conversion tool, and it hasn't advanced in version since the start of this year. This makes me sad, because I have found FOP a very slow and clunky tool. Today I successfully used it to transform a one-page test document in a few minutes, but when fed my manuscript, it ruminates for three hours (the time it takes me to go downtown, buy some shirts, and come back) without a shred of output. I rate this as Unusable.
Turning DocBook XML into XSL-FO is easy; one can use any XSLT processor (and there are lots of these) with the SourceForge DocBook project's own stylesheets, and there you have it. Why isn't turning this XSL-FO into PDF, which in theory would be a more commonly desired transformation, just as easy? Do people only use XSLT for turning XML into HTML, and don't care enough about any of its other potentials to encourage development of XSL-FO transformation tools? I don't know right now. I certainly hope not, since I am hoping to bless Duck with an export-to-PDF option, but nothing I've found so far seems an adequate framework for it.
(Observation: it's almost assuredly more difficult to write XSL-FO-to-whatever software than anything you can do with XSLT, since it involves taking nice, clean, predictable XML and turning it into some other arbitrary and exception-prone file format. So, I bet this has something to do with it.)
All that said, I spied a new XSL-FO ORA book the last time I was in the office. Maybe I'll try to nick me a copy. I hope I don't end up having to code my own XSL-FO-handling libraries, but... we'll see.
Yes, more thought of big projects to do, even in the midst of all this. It has occurred to me that it's coming up on my second anniversary as a Rsdnt. of the Cmmnwlth. of Msschstts. (moved here Halloween 2000) and during this time I've accomplished one all-my-own personal project, which was ComicsML and its attendant essay. (And don't even ask where that is right now. I consider it no longer an active project but mere food for thought (not that you'd know it by reading its web page or anything). However, a colleague has expressed interest in taking it over as a project again, and I find this interesting enough that I'll tend to it once this whole load is offa me.) Right after that I got involved in book writing, and (modulo a few O'Reilly Network articles and weblog entries that got me some positive attention) this is all I've done. Now, more than anything, I just want to cut loose again, pursue my own interests, get back into the business of building strange and wonderful things, unable (and unwilling) to predict what I'll work on from one month to the next. I used to do this constantly back in Maine -- all the cruft on jmac.org is testament to this -- and to do this in the context I've built since 2000, with all the communities I've found and places I've been and, yes, books I've written, well. Speaking as my own biggest fan, I can't wait to see what I'll do.
"Oh, The Places You'll Go," smirks M when I get on this topic.
She doesn't know the half of it.