[originally posted 4/11/2009]
More notes on XSL Formatter:
A common way of producing PostScript output via XSL Formatter is to output via the “Adobe PDF” printer (if you have Acrobat installed, of course), which in most contexts also means the Windows PostScript printer driver. So if you know a little bit but not a lot about how that works, you might wonder how they get bookmarks to work when using that output method, since printers shouldn’t understand anything about purely screen features like bookmarks. Unknown to me (until Friday, that is) was that it’s possible to pass PostScript directly through to the output using Pscript_Win_PassThrough. XSL Formatter uses this to output pdfmarks in the right places, which then results in printed PostScript that distills to a PDF with bookmarks in it. I haven’t dug into the APIs yet because I haven’t needed to, so Pscript_Win_PassThrough might not be the correct function name, that’s just how it shows up in the PS output.
Despite having and using this mechanism, neither the “Adobe PDF” printer nor the internal PostScript creator (designated by using “@PS” as the name of the printer to use) will output tagged figures. Only the internal PDF creator (“@PDF” as the name of the printer) is able to do that. I’m not sure if this is a design issue in the product itself, or just a feature that hasn’t been implemented yet. Time will tell.