Subject: Generating high-level formatting output From: Norman Gray <norman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Date: Fri, 11 Jun 1999 11:14:56 +0100 (GMT) |
Greetings, On Thu, 10 Jun 1999, Nik Clayton wrote: > >From our point of view, the killer missing feature from our current > toolbox is a way to go from DocBook to *roff. A colleague, Chuck I've spent a little time thinking about this (but unfortunately no more than that). I recently produced a simple back-end which would help produce high-level LaTeX (ie \section, \emph, rather than a TeX representation of the FOT). The weakness of this is that it encourages you to revert to the bad-old-days of one stylesheet per output format. A better way, and one I might return to if I decide we need 'roff output, would be to do the `print formatting' step as a transformation from the document DTD to some DTD oriented towards high-level formatting, then further transform that to LaTeX, 'roff, or whatever using a simple transforming step which, because it wouldn't have to do any rearrangement or numbering or anything clever, would be a doddle to write (maybe even awk would be enough!). The output DTD could be something simple like: <div level="1"><title>Section title</title> <para>Here is some <span type="emph">emphasised</span> text. </div> with obvious edits to turn it into LaTeX or 'roff. Does anyone know if such a DTD already exists? I vaguely remember that the LinuxDoc DTDs were more-or-less a translation of LaTeX structures into SGML -- is that right? With that developed, and a suitable set of output elements identified, the next step could be to designate these as DSSSL-type FOs, and support them directly in back-ends. Does that make any sense? All the best, Norman --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Norman Gray http://www.astro.gla.ac.uk/users/norman/ Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK norman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx DSSSList info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/dsssl/dssslist
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