On Sun, 10 Jun 2007, Pepe Barbe wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I have used ConTeXt in the past and I have been very pleased with it
> and the results obtained, much more than LaTeX.
>
> Now I am looking into a solution that would allow me to layout the
> content ConTeXt and in other formats that ConTeXt does not (Forgive my
> ignorance, if I am wrong) output, like HTML, Plain Text, or RTF (Those
> are the formats that I can think of that are interesting to me
> currently).
>
> Reading the Wiki one of those solutions would be XML, but I know very
> little about the subject, so this email is to ask about experiences in
> similar endeavors, other solutions for the same problem and how
> practical this is.
I have been exploring for something like this, but unfortunately have
not found anything completely satisfactory. For "simple" documents,
that is, only text, XML is the easiest. You have to determine a xml
dtd, and then it is relatively easy to write context commands to parse
it. It is also easy (but slightly cumbersome) to write a xsl
stylesheet to parse xml into html. Most browsers do the xslt
transformation on the fly. I found xml+css to be the easiest way to
go, since you can do almost a one-to-one mapping of your ConTeXt
commands. But most xml websites say that it is the "old" method and
should not be used.
To get plain text, you can do lynx -dump or something similar. I am
sure there will be ways to convert xml to rtf, but I have not explored
them.
Some of the difficulties that I faced with simple documents was:
1. What is the xml equivalent of ||
2. What is the xml equivalent of ~ ( ??)
3. What is the xml equivalent of
\abbreviation {EECS} {Electrical Engineering and Computer Science}
and then \EECS\ and \infull{EECS}.
I did not have time to explore further, so I left my xml experiments
there. For me the hardest part was to learn the xml way of thinking.
> I suppose that I would use this for general writing and for academic
> as well (Maths and engineering).
For more complext documents (esp math), I do not like xml as an input
format. Mathml is too verbose for me to write. Then there is the
question of how useful is it to have a xml + mathml document. ConTeXt
can parse it, and so can some of the browsers, but most browsers can
not. Converting to html + images looks ugly, unless you put in a lot
of effort. I have not tried converting xml+mathml to rtf or some
office format. For complicated documents, I do not see the use of
having an xml document. Most people are happy receiving a pdf. If
someone wants to edit my files, and cannot edit tex file, he/she will
not be able to edit xml files. If they use an office application to
edit the file, I will need to backport the modifications manually. So
he/she might as well use pdf annotation tools.
If you do want to explore furhter, perhaps the easiest way is to use
tex4ht, which does a decent job with most context documents and can
convert to html, xml, and open office format. I do not like tex4ht
because its html output is too verbose, and its documentation is a bit
hard to follow.
Aditya
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