Re: [xsl] complex positioning problem

Subject: Re: [xsl] complex positioning problem
From: Bruce D'Arcus <bdarcus@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 3 Nov 2004 08:00:46 -0500
On Nov 3, 2004, at 2:58 AM, Geert Josten wrote:

Wendell noted correctly that your input document doesn't cover all situations. Even more, I think it is just not complex enough for the general problem of numbering citations.
I'm afraid it's going to have to be.

Because more difficult examples are too complex to handle?

Two things:


First, the author-year class (already implemented) is arguably more complex (though a different problem). Being able to get (Doe, 1999a, b) is not easy, but it works.

Second, the algorithm for numbers isn't that hard (in plain English): take a list of distinct db:biblioref/@linkend values and number them based on order of occurrence (unless they should be numbered based on author order in the bib list). I'll take a look at your explanation.

For the footnote style, I need to identify the first occurrence of every distinct db:biblioref/@linkend value.

Because of general lack of support for XSLT 2, I really tend to stick to XSLT 1. If this can be solved in XSLT 1, then it shouldn't be a problem in XSLT 2.

I really have no programming background, and my time to spend on this limited (I have a day job!). I'm someone with an itch to scratch. XSLT 2.0 has features that are very useful for this sort of thing, and Saxon is a good processor.


I think what I've done so far is difficult to do with 1.0. My tendency is to want to say it might be better to use Python or Perl to do some of the pre-processing I currently do in XSLT 2.0. However, I'm not religious about it: I'd be happy if interested people with more general XSLT skills could help me get the code modified such that it could also work in 1.0 contexts (we had a discussion about this a week ago).

Bruce

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