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Comment by oxplot | Hacker News Reader

Recently I've been playing with Prince [1] and I've found it to be very powerful with excellent support for paged media. Given that HTML, CSS, Javascript, SVG is used to build the document, it's also familiar to most people already. There doesn't seem to be any open source competitor to Prince though.

[1]: http://www.princexml.com/

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I want to echo the support for Prince here, even though it's not open-source it is a very useful piece of software. I create web-based art books at a museum[1], and Prince has allowed us to generate high-quality PDFs[2] and even print-on-demand editions of the same book for very little additional effort. Full-bleed images, roman numeral page numbers, footnotes, multi-column text pages, all are possible through CSS.

In a past life I was a print designer relying on Adobe software for everything, and it is tremendously liberating to be able to leave that world of vendor-lock-in behind (InDesign has a nasty habit of making each new version's files incompatible with previous ones). So compared to where I'm coming from, Prince (even as proprietary software) is a big step forward because it allows me to work in open formats.

[1]: http://www.getty.edu/publications/romanmosaics

[2][PDF, 8MB]: http://www.getty.edu/publications/romanmosaics/assets/downlo...

PrinceXML is excellent, we used it for many years for typesetting programs for conferences, etc. After a while, though, I picked up enough LaTeX to be competent at generating LaTeX from our applications (just as we would generate HTML or any other markup) and that's what I use for report generation now. While there are more templates to maintain, the quality of the results is absolutely worth the effort.

On a tangent, a very nice "win" with the (pdf)LaTeX approach is that it's fairly easy to collate other PDF documents into a larger one, with a custom table of contents, consistent running headers and footers, index of authors, etc., and intersperse them with other content from our database. (This was done by splitting the child documents into pages with pdftk, then inserting them as "PDF graphics" into the generated LaTeX document -- and as long as the original PDFs were searchable, they remained searchable in the final output.) In one of our paper-intensive processes (a proposal approval workflow), this approach cut down tremendously on manual labour that was being done to prepare proposal dossiers, and the resulting collation was much easier for the reviewers to work with (e.g., everyone could turn to page "K-34" in the dossier, and be certain they were looking at the same page of the same document).

>There doesn't seem to be any open source competitor to Prince though.

This would be my issue with using it. This is partly why I stay with LaTeX for our book as I can convert it to other formats if I really need to. I find LaTeX gives me more control over presentation & type-setting than web-based stuff as well.

It also means your documents are locked to a proprietary standard that isn't that widely used (compared to say MS Word) and as such, may not be totally recoverable 10,20 or 30 years from now. You want to keep that in mind when you choose which typesetting system to use - for the record, I keep a digital diary that I intend should still exist 50 years from now. I use only markdown, and the occasional entry that mention really private stuff is ascii encrypted with GPG.

>It also means your documents are locked to a proprietary standard that isn't that widely used (compared to say MS Word)

HTML and CSS?

I assume there is some additional special sauce that enables you to do things that are not possible in a browser, which means you still won't get the exact formatting, index, etc correct.

To extent of my knowledge, Prince only implements web standards set by w3. The reason browsers can't do what Prince does is because they lack support for those standards.

Wikipedia lists some of what Prince does that others don't:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_layout_engines_(...

I'm happy to know about Prince, but US$3800 for a server license is beyond extravagant for any but large corporate users.

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