Re: [ANNOUNCE] DocBook2LaTeX v. 1.0.0

[Robin Berjon]

[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

I gather the list is having endless problems rendering DocBook to PDF
inside AxKit - well, this software of mine may be of interest to you
then, and you may get results that look better than the nroff solution
:-)

Sounds very cool :) At first glance I'm unsure whether it would require creating a new Language module or if the XPS can be used as is?

Thanks a lot Matt for this wonderful piece of software. To me,
XPathScript is the best of both worlds for XML and Perl. Taking
advantage of the design patterns in XSLT (templates/apply_templates,
cascading stylesheets, idea of not using any global variables and use
only XPath to reach a typesetting decision for each node), I was able
to tackle the daunting task of rendering DocBook (400+ tags) and still
produce maintainable code. More truly: my stylesheet is a *pleasure*
to maintain.

I'm glad there are people that like XPS, because those are often people that wouldn't want to use XSLT, and that means more users for AxKit. I personally wouldn't use XPS because I love XSLT and should I need Perl would put that in earlier stages, but it's great that there's a choice (especially if the two sides can get to insult one another copiously on IRC). The only thing I agree with in the thread on the topic is that the docs should reflect XPS's place: it's just one option amongst many. Seeing it so emphasized is what kept me away from AxKit-goodness too long (XML::NotXSLT -- shudder!).

Maybe we need a separate XPathScript mailing list then :-)

I don't think so :) Though maybe offline uses could go to the perl-xml list (that might get us more new users -- you should announce your stuff there if you haven't already as there are quite a few DocBook people there).

It is true
that XPathScript could use some functional improvements:

Patches welcome ;-)

  * propose the C implementations of the XML parser and XPath engine
    (e.g. XML::libXML) for speed, as pluggable alternatives to the
    pure-Perl versions;

IIRC Matt has started on that but bumped into issues (XML::XPath and XML::LibXML have different worldviews, mostly because the former uses the XPath OM and the latter the DOM). It may be that his old patches in that direction were close enough that they can be worked on easily.

  * allow inline Perl/XPathScript code in XML documents through processing
    instructions:
    <?xml version='1.0' encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
    <?perl
       $randomStylesheetVariable=42;
    ?>

Can XPS handle the processing-instruction() node test? If so, that could be implemented in XPS :)

--
Robin Berjon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Research Engineer, Expway http://expway.fr/
7FC0 6F5F D864 EFB8 08CE 8E74 58E6 D5DB 4889 2488


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