[pdftex] PassiveTeX

[Rolf Dieterich]

Hi,

I'm working on a business solution for rather complex reports which have to
be generated on the fly - not server-based, not in a controlled environment
(where you can still take a look at the output and make changes before finally
printing) but at the point-of-sale for the Windows platform.

For the typesetting part, pdfTeX is my choice. For the templating, I first
considered a Perl-based solution (the templating toolkit by Andy Wardley) but
now I discovered the excellence of XML technologies (in my case with MSXML
3.0/4.0, the Microsoft XML parser and XSL processor).

I still have to convince the decision-makers in my company that the TeX
heaven is a great place although the VB scripting hell is more populated and
better-known. For that purpose, it would be nice to eliminate the LaTeX code out
of my XSL files and use XSL-FO instead - with pdfTeX still as a backend, I
don't seriously consider to switch to Apache FOP or RenderX XEP.

Is a solution based on PassiveTeX (or with DSSSL and JadeTeX?) as the FO
processor possible? I'm not familiar with XSL-FO and PassiveTeX at all. So let's
take the following requirements - could they be met by XSL:Fo and
PassiveTeX?

- in my reports, I have to use the TrueType font of my company
- I have changed the behaviour of certain LaTeX markups, e.g. the tabbing
and itemize environment, to meet corporate design rules (things like: ragged
right, no extra vertical skip between the itemize/tabbing lines and the
surrounding paragraphs)
- German hyphenation (with a \hyphenation list)
- longtable package: at the moment, I don't use it because of certain
technical problems (changing the rule width \arrayrulewidth within longtable for
\cline and \hline doesn't behave well) but perhaps I still find a work-around
and use the package. Would it be possible to define tables in xsl:fo which
spread over multiple pages, with running heads/footers? Are they supported by
PassiveTeX?
- inclusion of a logo (at the moment, with \pdfximage)

What about the overall performance?

Thanks for any advice, experience or hint,

Rolf Dieterich

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