On Jan 21, 2009, at 11:34 AM, Lukas Theussl wrote:
Imagine for some obscure reason you would want to use doxia to transform a document from xdoc to latex to xhtml and back to xdoc. The final result should be identical to the original, which would not be possible if doxia changed some input on the way.
I have trouble imaging a situation where I'd need to convert a file to the format it's already in. Even if there were, it's virtually impossible to guarantee that all information will be preserved in a round-trip conversion. There will always be a case where something simply can't be expressed the same way (or at all) in some other format.
Another argument is that the automatic selection of format only works if the output format supports only one figure extension (eg latex only supports eps), but how do you choose the image in html, where you can have jpg, png, gif... ?
The automatic selection is normally used to choose between a raster format and a vector format, and JPG, PNG, and GIF are all raster, so the author would only create one of them.
The issues you raise are valid, but in practice, I don't think they're a big concern, at least not compared to the problem of choosing the appropriate raster vs. vector figures to match the output format, which apparently is impossible now.
Trevor
