--- Chris Burke <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Oleg Kobchenko wrote: > > There is the Publish addon to build PDF > > from near-HTML specification. Did anyone try > > to run it against J documentation? In anything > > would be more logical to produce PDF from J docs > > is its own Publish addon. > > This would be a lot of work. The Publish markup is like html, but far > from being html. > > >From outset, it would be better to have used a format like Latex, from > which we could generate both html and pdf. Right now, it would be too > much work for us to move away from html.
This discussion surfaced in 2004 under "[Jforum] Learning J" http://www.jsoftware.com/pipermail/general/2004-January/016691.html http://www.jsoftware.com/pipermail/general/2004-January/016690.html http://www.jsoftware.com/pipermail/general/2004-January/016689.html LaTeX is an interesting format, but it is loose, has limited audience and is not amenable to simple transfomation with tools like XSLT. XML and XSLT are best tools for the job, because they allow to write transformations declaratively in a simple way without writing parsers and programmatic tools. In fact, XSL-FO is THE standard thanks to which XSLT came to be as an expectedly ubiquitous byproduct, far supassing its initial purpose. Unlike LaTeX and good input/raw format to create documents is a particular HTML version, e.g. HTML 4.01 is a good common denominator of standards supported by most platforms, browsers and applications form Email to Word Processors. Moreover, HTML 4.01 is rich enough semantically and stylistically to describe a wide variety of documents. It is a long-established standard: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/ It is what the XML variety is directly based upon http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/ which means that it is amenable to XSLT transformation to virtually anything, specifically in a format, which can be used by a PDF publishing software. For XSL-FO there are free and commercial products that do specifically that: prodice PDF from XML using style and format defined in XSLT. In case of J Publish addon, a possible approach to handle J documentation would be such: - use Tidy to convert it to XHTML: http://tidy.sourceforge.net/ - apply a text-type-output XSLT with Publish addon markup - apply Publish addon to produce PDF There may be a small driver tool, that will take care of folders, multiple files, images, etc. ____________________________________________________________________________________ Boardwalk for $500? In 2007? Ha! Play Monopoly Here and Now (it's updated for today's economy) at Yahoo! Games. http://get.games.yahoo.com/proddesc?gamekey=monopolyherenow ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
