Hi Ryan, Its wonderful to hear you've made such great progress.
First of all, I'm against tying any of the APIs to XML parsers/libraries. (There are many painful reasons for this that resemble our logging experience - there is what is called XML-hell which is in essence requiring one version of an XML library when you are using another....very painful) So If we do an XML format this early (which I don't think is a good idea to be honest), IMHO it should be part of MORPHOS. The only problem is working on Morphos is an absolute pain due to the fact its in Jakarta Commons which has more traffic in a day then this list gets in 6 months! As for docbook, I'm not sure it is a good idea. I think FO is probably better suited for this kind of data. Docbook AFAIK doesn't preserve the styling very closely. With FO you could achieve a near 1-1 without any mismatch or *loss*. I could be wrong on this, I highly suggest you solicit the advice of Nicola Ken who knows more about such things. And hardly anyone knows docbook either for that matter. Lastly, I'm not sure I'd vote to move HDF out of the scratchpad before it has write capabillity. I view that as the test of maturity. The XML stuff is cool and while I think using XML for Excel makes a lot of sense, using it for Word makes even more sense, but the test of maturity in my mind is when you can read it in and write it back out all in one swoop. Until then I think the scratchpad is still the best place, but I'm interested in hearing what others think on that matter. -Andy --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Everyone, I want everyone to know that I made significant progress with HDF over the 4th of July break. I have been busy ever since with a short out of town trip and also the end of semester crunch at school. I have an event model in place but it is totally untested. What I want to do now is write a class that will convert a Word Document into XML using the event model. I wanted to get away from converting directly into XSL-FO because most people don't understand it. I was thinking of using the "DocBook" format check it out here: http://www.docbook.org , I think there are several stylesheets out on the web that will convert docbook to xsl-fo. I would like to hear thoughts on this. As soon as I have this done. I will write up some documentation other boring stuff (tests) and initiate a vote to move HDF out of scratchpad. Ryan -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
