"Joe Kesselman" <keshlam-nospam@c...> wrote in message
news:ZZqdnXZy5aYtdynbnZ2dnUVZ_vqpnZ2d@c......
> [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.

Hah -- I was pondering on the proper term. This sounds better than 'virtual
printing', or any such misnomers.

[etc]
> 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.

Peter Flynn also mentions this; I have my doubts if one could mould Word's XML
to fit to XSL-FO specs. I for one am not inclined to investigate that any
further. Anyway ... [continued below]

> 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.

[ctd.] -- if the only reason to put the Word doc through an XSLT process is to
do some mail merging and then making PDFs of the result, it makes much more
sense to drop the XSLT requirement. Word is perfectly able to do mail merges.
The OP mentions he's working on a *nix version; in that case OpenOffice could be
used, which surely has similar functionality. I wonder if Praveen has valid
reasons to do this using XSLT, or if it's just because of Word being able to
output XML, which then gets (ab)used by way of cross-platform document.

[Jw]