Hi Osamu,

Thank you, I am glad the PoC was useful. And thank you for pushing the "md"
branch forward.

On your questions:

* Chapter-by-chapter output: yes, I think it is better. It matches the
source structure (one XML file per chapter), mirrors the chunked HTML
output, and is much easier to read and edit, especially on a phone. For
what it is worth, the PoC I sent already works this way: convert.py writes
14 Markdown files (preface, chapters 1-12, appendix) with relative links
between chapters.

* Chapter-by-chapter with XSLT and xsltproc: yes, this should be possible.
XSLT 1.0 has no standard multi-file output, but xsltproc (libxslt)
implements the EXSLT exsl:document extension element, which writes
subsidiary result documents from a single transformation. That is the same
mechanism the DocBook XSL chunking stylesheets (chunk.xsl / chunker.xsl)
use to write one HTML file per section, so a chunked Markdown XSLT along
those lines should work. If it helps, I can try a small chunked variant of
your md XSLT as a test and report back.

* Removing the useless space: the space comes from whitespace-only text
nodes in the source, as in <ulink ...> <literal>mc</literal> </ulink>. Two
XSLT-side options:
- <xsl:strip-space elements="ulink"/> drops whitespace-only text node
children of ulink. It only removes nodes that are entirely whitespace, so
real spacing in mixed text like "see <literal>x</literal>" survives.
- normalize-space() around the link text when the ulink template builds the
Markdown link also cleans it.

In the PoC this never came up because the Python preprocessing runs the
repository's table and URL transforms on the merged XML first and
normalizes the markup before Pandoc sees it.

Osmancito

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