Re: E-books and XML.

["Schmitz Thomas A." <thomas.schmitz@uni-bonn.de>]

On 27 Aug 2014, at 16:38, john Culleton <John@wexfordpress.com> wrote:

> Some questions:
> What tool do you recommend for entering text etc.
> in XML format? I have the Bluefish Editor but
> usually code html in a plain editor (Gvim).

“Recommend” is too strong, because everything depends on the type of document you’re working on. I mainly use emacs + nxml mode. It validates on the fly, if your document is well defined, you can make it validate against a relax-ng scheme. To me, this is sufficient. I know that many serious users of nxml swear by oxygen. And I wouldn’t be surprised if Hans used his beloved Scite. (As for Lukas’s question: sorry, I don’t do Windows, I have no clue)

> 
> I downloaded the manual "Dealing with XML in
> MKIV" but it presupposes that the user builds his
> own conversion system. And it is "still somewhat
> exerimental." Is there a conversion system already
> in place somewhere?

I have been using it for a number of years now and have found it as stable as the rest of ConTeXt. Every once in a while, a bug will come up, and it will be fixed by Hans.

Have you seen the wiki page about TEI xml and about processing xml with Lua? That should be a good start.

> 
> For the beginner (me) is the MKII method easier
> to implement?

No, I would say both are about equal in complexity, but the mkiv method is so much more powerful and consistent, I really wouldn’t bother with mkii anymore.

One reason for me to use xml: I generate presentations, manuscripts, handouts from the same source (all with context). When I’m not typesetting the book myself, editors usually want some sort of word or libreoffice document. When my input is xml, it is relatively trivial to transform it to valid html and load that into libreoffice. 

Again: much depends on the type of document you’re working on. If every document you write is its own piece of art with numerous font effects and special typesetting needs on every page, I would stay with context syntax. But if your documents have a pretty predictable structure and you don’t expect to be forced to tweak individual page breaks, I would have a very long look at xml. I have grown to like it. If you have ever looked at a tex source document and tried to figure out where the missing brace in your }}}}}}}}}} orgy came from, you will love the tags and their nice nesting.

Thomas
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