[rfc-i] v3imp #A Convert to PDF with a quality tool
tony at att.com (Tony Hansen) Fri, 23 January 2015 22:55 UTC
From: "tony at att.com"
Date: Fri, 23 Jan 2015 17:55:33 -0500
Subject: [rfc-i] v3imp #A Convert to PDF with a quality tool
In-Reply-To: <54C20FFF.2040708@seantek.com>
References: <54C20FFF.2040708@seantek.com>
Message-ID: <54C2D165.1020508@att.com>
On 1/23/15 4:10 AM, Sean Leonard wrote: > Tool Request > #A Convert to PDF with a quality tool > > Despite various pronouncements that pagination doesn't matter, etc., > the fact is that people will be using paged media for a long time to > come. Pretty much every other SDO on the planet (except perhaps W3C) > issues its standards in a paginated form, including physical book or > electronic PDF options. > > To make IETF docs look good, it would be nice to have a quality tool > that captures all of the nuances of the vocabulary in PDF format. > Desired features include: > ? bookmarks for sections > ? observing pagination controls (see Improvement #2) > ? observing standardized headers and footers (compare with Tool > Request #B, forthcoming) > ? preserving intra-document and extra-document hyperlinks > ? formatting choices that allow documents to be printed on Letter or > A4 page sizes at 100% resolution > ? including comments and other annotations in the native PDF format > ? observing whitespace and line break preservation as directed by the > input (e.g., NBSP, NBHYPHEN, don't break this range of text, don't > collapse multiple spaces) > ? vector artwork > ? preserving text flow for accessibility purposes > ? font embedding > ? preserving "files" and other incorporated blobs as document-level or > page-level "File Attachments" > ? metadata preservation Please review the doc draft-hansen-rfc-use-of-pdf. I think every single item you mention above is discussed to some degree or another. > Short of developing a custom tool, the off-the-shelf standard that I > have found to work is xml2rfc -> HTML -> hand-tooling the HTML to look > "nice" -> Prince XML -> PDF. Prince XML is CSS aware and therefore > gets a lot of the formatting right, in a way that no other layout > engine has been able to handle. > > For draft-josefsson-pkix-textual-10 I believe that I used the > Chrome/Chromium rendering engine to PDF on Mac OS X, as it preserved > the no-break and (manually inserted) pagination control properties > correctly. Unfortunately, neither Chrome/WebKit nor Firefox/Gecko > rendering engines preserve hyperlinks when saving as PDF using the > print subsystem. > > Prince XML is commercial software but it is cheap enough for a site > license that I think the IETF/RFC Editor should just get a license and > make it available for online I-D and RFC conversion. Other than this, > consider converting xml2rfc v3 directly to PDF, in conjunction with > some style sheet input. (Upon writing that sentence, I think that > defining the style sheet input is significantly more complex than > writing the tool itself...which is why I think that going the (X)HTML > route offers a lot more flexibility and commercially maintained options.) Thanks for the pointers. I'm sure those who eventually work on the v3 tools will find it useful. Tony Hansen
- [rfc-i] v3imp #A Convert to PDF with a quality to… Julian Reschke
- [rfc-i] v3imp #A Convert to PDF with a quality to… Sean Leonard
- [rfc-i] v3imp #A Convert to PDF with a quality to… Tony Hansen