[XML-SIG] Replacing a Java tool-chain with 4Suite?

[Dieter Maurer]

Mike C. Fletcher wrote at 2003-1-15 08:29 -0500:
 > I've got a whole mess (word chosen deliberately :) ) of DocBook-XML 
 > documents (or more properly, document fragments) which comprise the 
 > PyOpenGL manual.  This set of files was originally converted to pdf, 
 > html-help, latex, and html by a Java toolchain (which is no longer 
 > functional, for reasons I haven't yet tracked down) including:
 > 
 > 	Saxon
 > 	DocBook XSL
 > 	Sun's Entity Resolver
 > 	Oasis' Docbook Catalog
 > 	WebEQ (for converting mathml to png)
 > 
 > Now, as far as I can see, 4Suite's 4xslt is an XSL processor similar to 
 > Saxon, with built-in entity resolution.  The XSL distro is just data, as 
 > is the Catalog (and the catalog's just for entity resolution anyway 
 > AFAICS). So, I would expect that I could just run 4xslt across the xml 
 > and xsl files and get a transformed file.
About 18 months ago, I switched from 4Suite to Saxon, because:

  *  4Suite processed DocBook/XML documents with Norman Walsh's XSLT
     stylesheets more than 10 times slower than Saxon.

  *  It took more than 5 times as much memory

  *  There have been many XSLT bugs in 4Suite leading to wrong
     rendering of the Docbook style sheets.
     Despite problem reports the bugs were not fixed.

Time had passed and 4Suite is now surely better than 18 months ago.
Nevertheless, you should make some checks whether it is now up to
your tasks.


Dieter