Our Philosophy
"I'd really rather avoid making docbook / xsltproc / fop etc. work. I'm sure it's great that XSLT is Turing-complete, but it's a royal pain to actually use for anything complicated. With Prince I whipped up a sample XML file and CSS print stylesheet in a few minutes. With the other workflow it took me hours to just get my head around getting started."
Contractor at ExxonMobil Corporation
| Acronym | Full name |
|---|---|
| XML | Extensible Markup Language |
| XHTML | Extensible HyperText Markup Language |
| SVG | Scalable Vector Graphics |
| CSS | Cascading Style Sheets |
| Portable Document Format |
We are proud members of the Web generation. And printing is our passion. Combining the two has been difficult until now; browsers work hard to get every pixel right on the screen, but pay little attention to printing. We think it is possible to use key Web standards like XML, XHTML, CSS and SVG to create beautiful PDF documents fit for printing. Actually, we know this for a fact since we do it every day.
Commitment to standards
Using Web standards to create PDF files has significant benefits. Over the last decade, the Web has changed the way information is produced, distributed and consumed. Many people know Web standards, and there is an abundance of software that can process XML, XHTML, CSS and SVG. Since these formats are open in every sense of the word, you will never find yourself locked into a proprietary format. PDF is an industry standard created and controlled by Adobe, but the format is well documented and viewer software exists for most platforms.
Cascading Style Sheets
CSS and XSL are both style sheet languages developed by W3C. CSS is used to style most Web sites, while XSL is used in the printing industry. Prince is based on CSS, not XSL. The two languages are quite different, but can often accomplish the same tasks. XML.com has published an article that compared how XSL and CSS could be used to format the same types of documents.
Briefly described, CSS is a simpler language with only one goal in mind: formatting documents. XSL, on the other hand, is a programming language which also can be used to format documents. While there are things XSL can do which CSS can't (most importantly, reorder elements in a document) we believe CSS is a better choice for most printing needs. First, CSS is a compact language which is readable and maintainable by humans. Second, CSS style sheets are widely used on the Web and these can often be reused for printing. Third, the things CSS can't do (again, reordering is the most imporant) is more naturally done before formatting the document.