RE: What best graphics format for RTF and HTML, using Jade/DSSSL/DocBook

[Richard Folwell <richardf@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Saturday, February 21, 1998 11:41 AM, Christian Leutloff 
[SMTP:leutloff@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] wrote:
> Richard Folwell <richardf@xxxxxxxxxx> writes:
>
> > I am trying to use Norman Walsh's DSSSL backends to produce Word RTF for
> > print, and HTML for online material.  Of the supported graphics formats,
> > is there one that will produce good results in both output formats?  For 
...
>
> Christian asked:
> Why aren't using different formats!? For printing you'll need high
> quality/high resolution. For the online documentation you have to use
> lightweigth graphics, to reduced the time for loading your
> documentation over the net.

Umm - I would prefer to do this, but how do I do it?  At the moment I have very 
basic SGML for figures, e.g.

<figure>
<title>A figure</title>
<graphic fileref="diagram.GIF" format="GIF"></graphic>
</figure>

Do I need to put some sort of conditional statement in at this level?  (Seems 
somewhat counter to the general idea of SGML, to abstract issues like this, but 
maybe with graphics this simply is not possible?).  What I would like to do is 
something like this:

<figure>
<title>A figure</title>
<graphic fileref="diagram"></graphic>
</figure>

and let the formatting backend decide which format file is needed for a 
particular output type.  This means that the SGML would not have to be changed 
if support for a new backend were to be added.  Of course the new graphics 
formats would need to be generated, but if all the graphics are produced by 
conversion from a single source, as you suggest, then this should not be a 
problem.

How do people normally handle this?

Richard



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