Re: Re: page on context and XML has moved

[Paul Tremblay <phthenry@iglou.com>]

On Tue, Apr 05, 2005 at 10:51:44AM +0200, Piotr Kopszak wrote:
> 
> That's very  promising indeed. Right now I'm  transforming my original
> xml  using xslt  to  a simpler  xml  file which  can  be processed  in
> document  order to  make the  ConTeXt file  containing  xml formatting
> commands as simple as possible. It would be nice to end up with an xml
> file which would  contain all the formatting information  and make the
> ConTeXt file unnecessary. But I'm afraid of two things:
> 
> 1. XSLT transformations  will get  so complex I  will get lost  in the
>    stylesheet at some point. 
> 
> 2. How the final  finetuning of the appearence of  the typeset version
>    should be done? Surely not by fiddling in the xml file which should
>    be generated by xslt (or  whatever) and I'm not sure making changes
>    in  the xslt  stylesheet to  make some  pages one  line  shorter or
>    longer is the  way to go.
>  

Hi Piotr,

First, if you use TeXML, make sure you download the latest version,
1.25-devel. This version is very stable and robust, and has the
texml_con script, which converts directly from XML to PDF or whatever
format you require:

texml_con <any option you can use with texexec> infile

It will create a ConTeX file along the way, as its first step. So if
your file is modern_photo.xml, a file called modern_photo.tex will be
created. You could open the modern_photo.tex file and make small changes
on that file. However, if you need to do this, you should instead type:

texml.py -e -c modern_photo.xml modern_photo.tex

That will create a ConTeXt file, which you can then alter.

Of course, having to alter the ConTeXt file defeats the purpose of XML.
You should be able to convert directly from XML to PDF. What alterations
do you think you will have to make? 

I know XSLT stylesheets can get very complicated. This is often the
case, including when I convert XML to HTML. You could try converting in
steps, making a small manageble change on one document, and then making
a small manageable change and so on.

Let me know your results. Good luck!

Paul

-- 

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*Paul Tremblay         *
*phthenry@iglou.com    *
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