Subject: Re: Generating high-level formatting output From: Joerg Wittenberger <Joerg.Wittenberger@xxxxxxxxx> Date: 11 Jun 1999 14:47:29 +0200 |
>>>>> "NG" == Norman Gray <norman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: NG> than a TeX representation of the FOT). The weakness of this is NG> that it encourages you to revert to the bad-old-days of one NG> stylesheet per output format. Period. NG> A better way, and one I might return to if I decide we need 'roff NG> output, would be to do the `print formatting' step as a NG> transformation from the document DTD to some DTD oriented towards NG> high-level formatting, then further transform that to LaTeX, NG> 'roff, or whatever using a simple transforming step which, because I'd like to second that. I remember a recent thread ("RE: About the source library") which in turn came effectivly to the same conclusion at how to design the internals for "Openjade" (or whatever). NG> The output DTD could be something simple like: NG> <div level="1"><title>Section title</title> <para>Here is some NG> <span type="emph">emphasised</span> text. </div> ... NG> LinuxDoc DTDs were more-or-less a translation of LaTeX structures NG> into SGML -- is that right? True. Some years back I went that way. I wrote a DTD targeted to minimal typing, totaly removing all formating related tags (like <toc>). Then I processed those documents adding even more taging than LaTeX would require (implying all those infos). The result of that stage correspondent approx. to your example. This intermediate representation was fed to some backends writing high level LaTeX, Lout, *roff -man, html and GNU info. Some glue code runs the appropriate formaters for .ps, plain ascii, xfig to eps/gif converters etc. At that point I added support for Linuxdoc exactly the way you described - I simply introduced another transformation from Linuxdoc to my LaTeX-alike-with-all-that-rearranging-done. It took < 2h. Last week I added another front end reader for IBM bookmaster syntax and now I'm happily converting from bookmaster to docbook DTD (not yet completly automatic). You see: the way works. For me it seems to work more efficient that writing DSSSL style sheets, that is I can get much more work done than by writing DSSSL and fighting jade/tex. NG> With that developed, and a suitable set of output elements NG> identified, the next step could be to designate these as NG> DSSSL-type FOs, and support them directly in back-ends. NG> Does that make any sense? I believe there is nothing wrong with the dsssl FOs even though it's sometime easier to simply use the "backend-FOs" in place than convince the backend to handle DSSSL-FOs. But I don't believe that that's worth to go into any international standard. At the other hand you are right. I think it would be worth to agree upon a "formating oriented DTD" (guess the FOT output of jade or an extension of that would do) and implement those FOs for a couple of backends with an xml syntax as front end. Another group could concentrated on DTD-transformatio tools... /Jerry PS: if you are curious; my server is broken currently, but you can find my abovementioned work under: ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/unstable/main/source/text/sdc_1.0.8beta.orig.tar.gz DSSSList info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/dsssl/dssslist
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