Prince XML/CSS formatter on MacOS X

[mikeday]

Hi all,

We recently produced a MacOS X port of Prince, our XML/CSS to PDF formatting tool. This is the first time we have made any software for MacOS X and we would love to hear some feedback from MacOS X users telling us that it works (hopefully!) and how we can improve it as a MacOS X application.

Technical details: Prince is a command-line application that reads XML files (including XHTML and SVG) and applies CSS style sheets to style them and produce PDF output. It uses the Apple Type Services (ATS) to query the available fonts, and we would be very interested in hearing how well it works for people who have lots of fonts installed.

Prince does not have a graphical interface for MacOS X yet, although it does have one for Windows. Does anyone have any recommendations when it comes to all the different user interface toolkits available for MacOS X? For example, how does Cocoa compare to the C APIs, or cross-platform GUI toolkits like wxWindows? Does the ease of use of Cocoa justify learning Objective-C in order to use it?

 

[Viro]

Prince does not have a graphical interface for MacOS X yet, although it does have one for Windows. Does anyone have any recommendations when it comes to all the different user interface toolkits available for MacOS X? For example, how does Cocoa compare to the C APIs, or cross-platform GUI toolkits like wxWindows? Does the ease of use of Cocoa justify learning Objective-C in order to use it?

The cross platform toolkits are just that. Cross platform. If you want your application to look native, and feel native you really should use Cocoa. Sure, toolkits like wxWidgets may use the Cocoa/Carbon widgets, but cross platform applications written using this binding look... wrong. The placements of widgets do not respect Apple's HIG and the app just behaves funny.

If you're targeting OS X, just go for Cocoa. It looks like you've managed to separate the logic from the UI in your application, so that shouldn't be too much of a hassle. Cocoa can be quite foreign at first if you're coming from a C++/Java background.