Peter B. West wrote:
> Bertrand is probably in the best position to comment wrt RTF. Is anyone
> familiar with MIF. Does it simply define page structures and flows?
I'm roughly familiar with MIF - did some rough HTML to MIF conversion
years ago.
Basically MIF is structured text that is annotated with stylenames, which
needn't even by defined in the MIF (but can, if I remember correctly).
As for the general discussion on renderer types: IMO, it's a mistake to
mangle "renderers" that produce formatted page-level output like PDF or
PostScript with "renderers" that produce flow output in other formatting
languages, like HTML, RTF or MIF. The latter is rather a conversion step,
and you would need not the area tree but rather the FO element tree to do
a good conversion.
Fundamentally, I think these two different kinds of "renderer tasks" just
have two things in common: a parser and an FO element tree, and that's it.
So my suggestion would be to implement only formatted output in FOP and
refactor the other outputs into a separate tool. If you need a clear
differentiation between the renderer types, you might take this one: do I
need to know the size of a glyph in a certain font/size to produce the
output? If yes, the appropriate renderer goes into FOP, if not, it goes
into a separate tool.
Just my 2 cents, of course.
--
Cappelino Informationstechnologie GmbH
Arnd Beißner
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