> Perharps the biggest success is that people start considering xsl-fo as a
> valid replacement solution for LaTeX in production environments :-).
ah, now you've really upset me:-)
Actually of course TeX does show up in one form or another in more than
one of the FO renderers so it's not a complete replacement.
I think though that the main features that latex has that FO lacks could
be used as a starting point for FO 2 requirements. Some of them have
been listed here recently.
principally better feedback between the rendering and the layout
specification/transformation. It's easy in latex for a reference element to
produce
"on page 9" or "on this page" or "on the facing page" depending on where
the referenced object is in relation to the callout.
Also of course you can say things like, if the rendered size of this
object is too wide, typeset in landscape, or at a smaller point size, or
in some other format altogether. (latex can typeset something into a
"box" measure it and if it's not suitable, throw it away and typeset it
in a different box in a different style).
Oh and mathematics of course: an encouragement for fo systems to support
presentation mathml would be good too!
Note this list of features that latex has that FO hasn't isn't supposed
to be a criticsm (I don't mean to spoil the birthday party, and anyway
20 year olds shouldn't really be at first year parties anyway:-) FO does
of course avoid the main flaw that latex has: latex is irretrievably tied
to one monolithic and quirky formatting system, and whatever the latex
documentation and guidelines say, authors of latex documents have a
nasty habit of mixing programing code and document text in interesting
ways that make further processing almost impossible. XML-XSLT-FO goes a
long way towards enforcing a clean separation.
David
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