Re: API to formatters and grove engines

Subject: Re: API to formatters and grove engines
From: "James Clark" <jjc@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 30 Jun 1997 14:07:57 +0700
> >You've got a large SGML document that contains a large number of ARTICLE
> >(say) elements.  You are writing an application that provides a GUI
> >interface to the user to select which ARTICLE in the SGML document they
are
> >interested in.  You then want to be able to present that article in two
> >ways: visually, by generating RTF and displaying/printing that, and
aurally
> >by generating a special text format that is input to a speech
synthesizer. 
> >The user may want to select multiple articles in a single session.  Is
this
> >right?
> 
> This is precisely and consisely what I intend to do , yes.
> Do you see a way to achieve this through an interface to Jade ? 

There are two things that are needed.  The first is to add the capability
to Jade to format just a specific element instead of the whole document as
now.  There are two ways you can do this.  One is simply to apply the
construction rule for that particular element: that will work if the style
sheet has been written with the intention of just formatting specific
elements.  The other way is to try to produce for the element that is being
formatted the same output that would be produced when that element is
formatted as part of the complete document.  This is harder to implement
but more useful in some situations.

The second thing that is needed is to be able to avoid having to reparse
the entire document for each formatting job; I can see two approaches to
this:

1. Implement a persistent store for groves.  The OLE automation grove
interface and Jade are both built on top of the same interface, so if this
was implemented for one, it would be available to both.

2. Provide an OLE automation interface to the style engine.  This would
allow you to apply multiple format operations on the in-memory document.

James


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