PDF workarounds

Jeff Fearn, doing some work for Red Hat out of Australia,
took a long,
hard look at resolving our problems with the passivetex
treatment of FO
in making PDFs.

His conclusion was, use a workaround in the XML.  This from
a guy who
hates workarounds to bugs in the tools!  So, that carries
extra weight
for me.

I want to hear from anyone who has problems with PDF output
and if these
fixes help.  Let's get some repeatable problems together
with existing
XML and file or support whatever bug reports we can.

Problem:  Poor Table Output

Reason: passivetex is not generating or passing adjustable
column widths
properly.

Workaround:  Set fixed column widths in all your XML tables:

...
<tgroup cols="3">
  <colspec colnum="1"
colname="Features" colwidth="3"
  <colspec colnum="2"
colname="Features" colwidth="3"
  <colspec colnum="3"
colname="Features" colwidth="1"
...

Problem:  Crashes on an image or cuts off the image.

Reason: ?

Workaround:  Set a fixed image size that is not too wide for
a page; we
used to set no more than 4" for Red Hat documentation,
since we printed
to a 5.5" W x 4.25" H page (iirc).

Does that cover all our current problems?

This current PDF output path is working pretty well.  It
even accepts
PNG images for both on-screen and printed output formats.


Then we can have _two_ good, solid choices, which would be
mighty nice.

- Karsten
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Uttered Karsten Wade <kwaderedhat.com>, spake thus:

> Then we can have _two_ good, solid choices, which would
be mighty nice.

It would indeed be nice.  However, I can't call passivetex
a good choice
since even it's developer appears to have abandoned it
three years ago AFAICT.

I'd love to be wrong about it, though.

-- 
I'm already an anomaly, I shall soon be an anachronism, and
I have
every intention of dying an abuse!
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