Using Saxon and your stylesheet, I get <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> and comments are copied through.
David -----Original Message----- From: Robert P. J. Day [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] <snip/> the first problem is that the transformation process loses all of the comments in the original file. the other issue is that the opening XML line <?xml version='1.0 ?> is transformed into <?xml version="1.0"?> ^ space is dropped and that space appears to be required. i'm just using xsltproc with this single .xsl file on the input file, so i'm not sure why the XSLT transformation is doing either of these. advice?
