More problems and questions 2

Thanks tp everyone for their comments. Here's my update:

> 1. Given that there exist FO renderer(s) written in Java, such as
> FOP, and given that some XSLT processors, such as Saxon, allow
> calling extension functions written in Java, is it possible to
> access FO renderer from within XSLT through this mechanism, with the
> goal of being able to ask the renderer some questions and give it
> some tests and then modify the transformation algorithm based on the
> results returned?

In general I'm not sure this is feasible.

OK, I'll have to drop this for now. But I really hope this bottleneck will be solved sometime in the future.

> 2. I transform XML to HTML, and I want the stylesheet to
> automatically insert width and height attributes in the img
> elements. My idea is that it is possible to implement this by
> calling extension functions implemented in Java which would open the
> image file by its URI and return its dimentions (and perhaps some
> other information, just in case). Has anyone tried this?
> Is there any free code available?

I now have a Java class that implements this and works perfectly with Saxon. If anyone else needs it, please contact me.

> 3. In my custom TeX macro packages (they're intended for typesetting
> mostly text with little code or math), I use \catcodes to enable
> "smart" character macros. For instance, a hyphen in the input
> expands into ~---, .... As there are no
> "character macros" in XSL, obviously what I need is some kind of an
> input filter ... Indeed, Saxon documentation says I can write
> such a filter in Java.

I found a simpler solution: I create a template with match="text()", in it I assign the current node to a variable, perform the necessary search-and-replaces on it, and then output it using xsl:value-of. Works for me, so far. Some simple string processing can be done in XPath, and where its capabilities are not sufficient, I call some simple Java functions.

Now a new problem:

I need to create a table of contents by extracting all <head> elements from a number of XML files and listing them in the root file. For each file, I write

<xsl:for-each select="document($filename)//head">

But then, a problem arises. There are two things I need to do before inserting a table of contents entry:

1. Some heads contain markup, in particular they may have some words in <em>...</em>. I want this markup to be preserved in the table of contents.

2. I also need to do some text processing on the text of the heading: change capitalization and remove trailing punctuation ("." or "," which may be part of a heading in the text but should be dropped in the TOC).

To satisfy the first requirement, the only method that I found is using <xsl:copy-of> which copies a specified node with all subnodes. However, for the second requirement, the only way to go is to create a saxon:assignable variable, do the necessary processing on it and then output the result.

The problem is that these two approaches are not compatible. I can only go one way or the other. <xsl:copy-of> does not allow any changes to what it copies; on the other hand, a variable created from the current node converts it to string, so all non-text subnodes are lost.

Any suggestions?
_________________________________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.

Share information about yourself, create your own public profile at http://profiles.msn.com.

XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list

<- Previous	Index	Next ->
Re: XML+XSL to HTML strategies advi, Paul Tchistopolskii	Thread	testing an attribute value and node, Russ Holmes
Re: Rendering: filling tag attribut, Lee Goddard	Date	RE: Saxon configuration (was: for-e, Kay Michael
	Month

<-prev [Thread] next->	<-prev [Date] next->
Month Index \| List Home