Re: [xsl] weird formatting and characters with <xsl:text disable-output-escaping>

[Spencer Tickner <spencertickner@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Michael and Wendell,

Thanks for the advice. I like Michael's idea of defining some form of
representation of the output and doing the final conversion with some
other language. Your serialization suggestion also sounds interesting
so perhaps I will spend a bit of time diving into that. Wendell as you
suggested xml can be imported into InDesign however I have found this
method to be problamatic and my end-users are used to placing tagged
text files into there various InDesign templates.

Also Michael mentioned using output-method="text" and "disable-output
escaping" this is what I tried to do in my original attempt, but came
up with badly formatted output. If you have a sec and check out my
original post maybe there is a way to get the text at least into some
nicely formatted form.

Either or, I appreciate all the advice and suggestions,

Spencer

On 4/26/05, Michael Kay <mike@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > Shoot just realized we can't even do that as InDesign uses mandatory
> > nested tags to define paragraph styles, like <this is a tag<this is a
> > nested tag>>, so perhaps I will have to look at this all another way??
> >
>
> This is the general problem of generating output in a format that has a
> passing resemblance to XML but is not actually XML. There are a surprising
> number of such formats still in use (some of them, of course, are valid
> SGML). There are a number of choices available:
>
> (a) define an XML representation of the required output and generate that
> using XSLT. Then write a converter in some other language to convert this
> XML to the target form.
>
> (b) write a stylesheet that outputs text (xsl:output method="text")
>
> (c) write a stylesheet that outputs a mixture of XML and text (xsl:output
> method="xml" with disable-output-escaping). Messy but sometimes pragmatic.
>
> (d) implement a custom serialization method. If you have some Java skills,
> this isn't as daunting as it may sound, for example in Saxon you can do it
> by subclassing the serializer that comes with the product.
>
> The main thing is to try and keep the peculiarities contained to as small a
> part of your code as you can. I'd suggest going for (a) if you can.
>
> Michael Kay
> http://www.saxonica.com/