Re: XML and empty line (DocBook)

[Simon Pepping <spepping@scaprea.hobby.nl>]

On Wed, Jul 31, 2002 at 09:43:00PM +0200, Simon Pepping wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 29, 2002 at 09:58:35PM +0200, Tobias Burnus wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > Using 2002.7.12 I found the problem that
> > 
> >      <title>Apache
> >      <filename>mod_rewrite</filename>
> > 
> >      magic</title>
> > 
> > causes the problem with the empty line ( = \par ) any idea how to prevent
> > this problem (except by editing the XML source)?
> >   ! Paragraph ended before \XMLDBdotitle was complete.
> >   <to be read again>
> >                      \par
> 
> Even in XML mode two blank lines generate a \par. I cannot solve this;
> perhaps Hans knows a way out.
> 
> Both this and your previous problem (and Michael's answer to it) show
> that TeX has no knowledge of ignorable white space. It cannot, because
> it does not know the DTD. (Ignorable white space is all white space in
> elements that do not have mixed content.)
> 
> > Addionally I get frequently a ']¿' at the beginning of my documents.
> 
> I believe this is another parsing problem with the internal DTD
> set. (AFAIK you should get '¿]' from '>]' in the document.

Perhaps it is better not to require that an XML parser in TeX can do
all these features right. It must be possible to rewrite the XML file
as a 'normalized' file and submit that to the TeX parser. For example,
it is possible to write a ContentHandler for a validating SAX parser
that removes ignorable white space. Perhaps the same is possible with
an XSLT script, but I am not sure if any XSLT processor does a
validating parse. Such a procedure would get rid of ignorable white
space, and it would resolve entities, thus making the work of a TeX
parser much easier.

Regards, Simon

-- 
Simon Pepping
email: spepping@scaprea.hobby.nl