RE: [xsl] XSL Newbie: How2 write transforms for variable XML

[davec@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Dave Cramer)]

> At 04:16 AM 1/28/2005, it was written:
> >    allows rendering a input xml document to be rendered in
> >     multiple output media like print, browser, eBook etc.,
> >
> > My apologies here. What I meant by eBook was formatting an XML document
> > into an eBook suitable for rendering on a palmtop or a eBookReader. Again,
> > this may not exist as of now but should be possible using XSL-FO.
>
> If your eBook uses the Open eBook format, which is XML-based (it's 
> HTMLish with provisions for uniform metadata and so forth), it might 
> be considerably easier to go straight into it via XSLT than to use 
> XSL-FO for this.
>
> An XSL-FO browser could make a nice platform for reading e-text, but 
> that's not where the eBook specifications seem to have gone --
>
> http://www.openebook.org/oebps/oebps1.2/download/oeb12-xhtml.htm
>
> (Of course that document is dated 2002: I don't know what's been 
> happening more recently in this area or where vendors are going.)
>
> Regards,
> Wendell

I do quite a bit of eBook production, using XSL to transform XML 
files extracted from Quark documents into OEB format (HTML with 
extras, as Wendell says), and also into one of the Palm formats (XSL 
output is a text file). The OEB files can be converted into .LIT 
files for Microsoft Reader for PC using proprietary software from 
Overdrive. The Palm text files are converted into the final Palm 
ebook format with another proprietary program from Palm Digital Media 
(or whatever company bought it last).

Since we have Quark files, we create eBook PDFs directly from those 
without going through XML and XSL-FO.

Some people are trying to create an open-source eBook reader 
(www.openreader.org), based on OEB standards, to avoid the current 
nightmare of dozens of incompatible eBook formats and readers.

Dave Cramer