[Jongware] wrote:
> So, if PDF is printer output, your question becomes: "how do I print an xml on
> unix to pdf?"

Actually, the term usually used is "render" rather than print.

The usual approach to getting from XML to PDF is to use XSLT stylesheets 
(using a processor such as Apache Xalan) to style the XML into XSL-FO 
markup, then run that through a Formatting Objects renderer (such as 
Apache FOP) to get PDFs.

> 2. XML is an abstract data format. If you print XML, you'll get lots and lots of
> <this>stuff</this>.

XML is raw markup. However, XML-based rendering languages can be as rich 
as anything Word can do (or more so); XSL-FO is one example thereof.

Ideally, the right thing to do is to drop Word from your toolchain; it's 
too much of a hassle to work with, and its markup is at the wrong level 
for effective retargeting. (For this kind of task what you want is a 
semantic markup system).  If you can't, be prepared to wrestle with it.

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() ASCII Ribbon Campaign  | Joe Kesselman
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