More problems and questions 2

Subject: More problems and questions 2
From: "anilia bruho" <musoryanin@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 18 Sep 2000 19:58:34 GMT
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?
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