Re: [xsl] Converting XML into ODT document to print as paper

["Peter Flynn peter@xxxxxxxxxxx" <xsl-list-service@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 24/09/2020 08:57, Manuel Souto Pico terminolator@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
> I would need to convert XML to something that has a fixed page layout 
> ready to print, like ODT/OOXML or PDF.

Do you want other people to be able to edit the result? ODT/OOXML are 
designed to be editable; PDF is not.

> I know OOXML is complex, but since the final document needs to be 
> printed and keep the same layout, probably HTML output is not good for 
> this (I guess!).

A good web designer can probably create a layout that looks the same and 
honours the paged-media CSS, but I don't think there are any guarantees.

> What I need at the moment is just a quick and dirty proof of concept
> to show that this conversion is feasible and not too difficult, to
> show it to decision makers (I'm not a XSLT developer myself).

XSLT will certainly be involved IMNSHO. My personal preference would be 
XML > LaTeX > PDF but not everyone knows LaTeX.

> My first thought was to unzip the ODT model I have, look at the 
> content.xml inside and then try to transform my XML into that same 
> structure (as suggested here: 
> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/38298174/directly-convert-a-single-xml-file-to-docx). 

That is indeed possible. Just complicated.

> However, probably that's the hard way...

You spotted it :-)

> I'm doing some research, any tips or pointers or advice or 
> recommendation or examples here would be highly appreciated. Is there 
> any best practice to do this? or a ready-made solution?

I did a quick test just now and the results are at
http://xml.silmaril.ie/software

Peter