[xmlroff] Comparing (or not) xmlroff and FOP [Was: xmlroff-list Digest, Vol 14, Issue 4]

[Tony Graham]

On Wed, Jul 09 2008 12:39:49 +0100, bowditch_chris at hotmail.com wrote:
...
> I concur that none of the FOP developers or users have done anything
> like a performance test between xmlroff and FOP. If they did they
> stayed quiet about it. I would be interested to see the results of
> such a comparison :)

I'm not particularly interested, since xmlroff will more than likely get
slower over time as more features are added, and to concentrate on
performance now would be premature.

There was an exchange on a mailing list several years ago where RenderX
claimed to have the fastest XSL formatter, which AntennaHouse countered
by saying xmlroff was faster, but they took care to also point out that
xmlroff didn't do as much as other processors (e.g., their's).

...
>> FOP and xmlroff have different approaches: FOP tries to flush each page
>> as quickly as possible; xmlroff is still working towards being able to
>
> That used to be true in FOP 0.20.5 but that's no longer true of the
> 0.9x versions where a best fit algorithm is used over the life of the
> page sequence.

Thanks for the update.

>> work on the area tree to get the best result.  (The eventual plan has
>> always been to have loadable modules to do the tinkering with the area
>> tree so you can determine your trade-off between tinkering and speed.)
>
> That is a commendable objective. It would be great if the user could
> choose between first-fit/best-fit/total-fit by the mere adjustment of
> a config file :)

Getting headers and footers working is also a commendable objective, and
even that is taking a long time (a long time to find the time, among
other reasons).

I think that a modular approach and settable layout strategies is part
of FOray [1] and aXSL [2].

The libfo-examples example that uses a loadable module is meant to
illustrate making the FO and area trees available to a loadable module.

Regards,


Tony.

[1] http://www.foray.org/module/layout/
[2] http://www.axsl.org/