dm-l April 2005

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16 participants
25 discussions

RE: [dm-l] what xslt can't do..?
by Binkley, Peter 07 Apr '05

07 Apr '05

I've just noticed that I hadn't removed some unnecessary lines, evidence of a false start; the stylesheet is now down to 63 lines. Peter -----Original Message----- From: dm-l-bounces(a)uleth.ca on behalf of Binkley, Peter Sent: Thu 4/7/2005 3:33 AM To: peter.robinson(a)dmu.ac.uk; Digital Medievalist Community mailing list; dm-l(a)uleth.ca Subject: RE: [dm-l] what xslt can't do..? The Digital Medievalist List (see end of message for contact information and project URLs). ----------------------------------

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RE: [dm-l] what xslt can't do..?
by Binkley, Peter 07 Apr '05

07 Apr '05

Unless I've misunderstood the challenge, I think this 70-line, single-pass stylesheet will fill the bill: http://www.wallandbinkley.com/robinsonchallenge/paginate.xsl . Peter's XML text is available here: http://www.wallandbinkley.com/robinsonchallenge/text.xml . The output looks like this: <document> <head>The whole text and all the texts</head> <page n="1"> <pageheader>Text 1, para 1</pageheader> <div> <head>First text</head> <p n="1">some text starts here and goes ita<hi rend="italic">lic an</hi></p> </div> </page> <page n="2"> <pageheader>Text 1, paras 1, 2 and 3</pageheader> <div> <p n="1"><hi rend="italic">d then</hi> we get a pagebreak</p> <p n="2">so the text finishes</p> <p n="3"> with yet another page </p> </div> </page> ... </document> The pages are presented in discrete elements, each containing only the text of that page, with all markup preserved and all tags well-formed. The basic mechanism involves using a key to index all the text nodes by their page number: <xsl:key name="text" match="text()" use="preceding::pb[1]/@n"/> It is then easy to create a node-set containing all the text nodes for a given page, like this: <xsl:variable name="texts" select="key('text', $thispage)"/> With that we can process the ancestors of those text nodes to create the output for that page, like this: <xsl:apply-templates select="/div/*[.//text()[count(.|$texts) = count($texts)]][1]"> As it stands this stylesheet is horribly inefficient, since it has to rebuild the node-set of text nodes every time it executes a template (since you can't pass a node-set as a parameter). Perhaps there's a way to move all the processing into the main for-each loop to avoid using templates. I'm not sure I understand why the final page break is problematic. Why would you want anything other than the way it is marked up in the source? (I notice that I've neglected to include the text 2 head in the page header, as in the example "Second text, head", and my punctuation doesn't match that example, but I'm too tired to fix it now.) Peter Binkley peter.binkley(a)ualberta.ca -----Original Message----- From: dm-l-bounces(a)uleth.ca on behalf of Peter Robinson Sent: Wed 4/6/2005 3:13 PM To: dm-l(a)uleth.ca Subject: [dm-l] what xslt can't do..? The Digital Medievalist List (see end of message for contact information and project URLs). ---------------------------------- Peter Baker says... >I must say, though, Peter, that this isn't the first time you've >mentioned things that XSL can't do. I'm not sure I believe that it can't >be done. Someday, when we've all got lots of time, we'll have to have a >programming shootout. You can offer up a problem that you think XSL >can't handle, and you code it in C (or whatever it is you use), and I'll >use XSLT, and we'll see who gets there first. indeed, I have become rather a bore on this subject. And I have several times pointed out that XSLT has great difficulty with what is conceptually a simple task: just show me the text on one page. I have several times set the challenge: somebody, try and do with XSLT what we do for many thousands of pages (in the most basic form; just reproduce what we do for a single page of the Hengwrt Chaucer, for example). I have had some extremely lengthy explanations of how it *could* be done, and I am certainly prepared to believe these might actually work. In the same way, I am sure that with sufficient ingenuity one could use a lawnmower to heat a house. Just, one might find easier ways to do it. So, here is a simple example, then: <div> <head>The whole text and all the texts</head> <div> <pb n="1"/> <head>First text</head> <p n="1">some text starts here and goes ita<hi rend="italic">lic an<pb n="2"/>d then</i> we get a pagebreak</p> <p n="2">so the text finishes</p> <p n="3"> with yet another page <pb n="3"/> and another page start </p> </div> <div> <head>Second text</head> <pb n="4"/> <p n="1">here my new text on the next page etc etc</p> <pb n="5"/> <p n="2">here my new text on the next page etc etc</p> </div> </div> So, Peter, here is your challenge. Just make us an xslt file that pulls out just the text on each of the five pages. It would be a nice bonus if each page were to have a header which told us what text there is on each page (for example: page 3 contains 'First text, para 3 -- Second text, head'; page 5 contains just 'Second text, para 5'). To make it slightly more of a challenge: you should do this direct from this sample, and not from a transform of this sample. By the way, notice the problematics about the final page break. Should it be.. <head>Second text</head> <pb n="4"/> <p n="1">here OR <head>Second text<pb n="4"/></head> <p n="1">here OR <head>Second text</head> <p n="1"><pb n="4"/>here Answers on the back of a postage stamp please. all the best Another Peter _______________________________________________ Digital Medievalist Project Homepage: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org Journal (December 2004-): http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/journal.cfm RSS (announcements) server: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/rss/rss2.cfm Wiki: http://sql.uleth.ca/dmorgwiki/index.php Change membership options: http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/listinfo/dm-l Submit RSS announcement: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/newitem.cfm Contact editorial Board: digitalmedievalist(a)uleth.ca dm-l mailing list dm-l(a)uleth.ca http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/listinfo/dm-l

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tex, unicode, etc
by Peter Robinson 06 Apr '05

06 Apr '05

> > I won't try to cover any of the ground that John > McChesney-Young has > > covered in his post, except to say that that is also my > sense of the > > state of LaTeX right now: support for UTF-8 is still clunky, and > > Unicode/OpenType fonts are not natively supported. To judge > from its > > website the promising Omega project seems to have stalled. > To follow this up: on at least one operating system, matters are rather different. In Mac OS X, there is a quite wonderful TeX implementation named XeTeX: go see http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id=xetex. This does Utf-8 right out of the box -- CJK, Thai (with hyphenation tables even!!), Arabic, Mongolian, polytonic greek, just anything as far as I can see. It also seems to work nicely with OpenType font families, etc. It also works seamlessly with LaTeX, including some real tricksy bits of LaTeX (long tables, for instance, spanning many pages). I got this running from bare ground to making Arabic pdfs in about 30 minutes -- you have to install the full TeX, XeTeX, and a graphic UI, TeXShop (which creates pdfs straight out of the TeX, which is very cool), but all this is nicely explained on the XeTeX site. I don't yet know whether XeTeX works ok with the EDMAC critical edition macros, but there's no reason why it should not. I'd have to say that TeX is still, after all these years, just the best typesetting system I have seen. I agree with Dan, that it is annoying in that appartently simple things (changing page sizes!) can be hard to do in TeX. But boy, does it make up for it in its power to make really complex, really beautiful pages. I am currently setting some 10,000 pages of a historical edition (about 9,000,000 words) from XML, and for a task like this, TeX is incomparable. We use our own transformer tool to translate the xml into tex source, and away we go (as always, we have to do dicy things like make up pages from bits of other pages mosaiced together, with lots of text bounded by empty elements, so XSL does not cut it for us). all the best Peter

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RE: [dm-l] TAN: Unicode, XML, and LaTeX
by Binkley, Peter 04 Apr '05

04 Apr '05

I've used FOP for some DocBook-to-PDF transformations and had no trouble with it. But I haven't pressed it very far, and I don't think there were any tables involved. There's a compliance chart at the FOP site: http://xml.apache.org/fop/compliance.html Peter Peter Binkley Digital Initiatives Technology Librarian Information Technology Services 4-30 Cameron Library University of Alberta Libraries Edmonton, Alberta Canada T6G 2J8 Phone: (780) 492-3743 Fax: (780) 492-9243 e-mail: peter.binkley(a)ualberta.ca > -----Original Message----- > From: dm-l-bounces(a)uleth.ca [mailto:dm-l-bounces@uleth.ca] On > Behalf Of Daniel O'Donnell > Sent: Sunday, April 03, 2005 09:45 PM > To: Peter Baker > Cc: Digital Medievalist Community mailing list > Subject: Re: [dm-l] TAN: Unicode, XML, and LaTeX > > The Digital Medievalist List (see end of message for contact > information and project URLs). > > ---------------------------------- > What scared me off XSL-FO was a recurring theme on TEI-L that > suggested that XSL-FO engines are too expensive or too poor > to be used very much by academics. In particular, it is > claimed that the free ones don't do tables very well, and the > ones that do do tables well are expensive. > I'll take a look at the ones you suggest; I'm also looking at > Context, though, as somebody noted, it ain't consumer > friendly in its set up. On TEI-L, it has often been suggested > that XML-ers can see LaTeX largely as a PDF engine. > > I must say that two days intensive work with LaTeX has left > me with mixed feelings. On the one hand, I can produce a very > neat looking articles suitable for immediate publication in > Phys Rev Letters. On the other hand, the whole system seems > pretty old fashioned. It claims to separate content and form, > but it doesn't really: all markup is basically format > oriented. It looks like the system the original HTML design > was probably based on. SGML and XML are a conceptual leap > forward, although SGML suffered from a terrible lack of > delivery mechanisms, and XML seems to be suffering from the > lack of a consumer oriented Print/PDF mechanism. > > So in short, I think as an old SGML/XMLer, I'd rather stick > with a concept I understand (trees and XPATH), that convert a > tree model to a process-model like LaTeX seems to be; but I'd > also prefer my output to be cheap and easy to produce, > without limitations (for example) on the type of tables I can > produce. My immediate goal for learning some kind of XML > > typesetting language is to see if I can automate the > production of Brodart call-number stickers for my personal > library (I'm a dork, as my neighbour has repeatedly noted), > something that requires me ultimately to set a very unusual > page size. This is not hard to do in XSL-FO, as far as I can > tell, but quite difficult in LaTeX: another reason to stick > with FO, if I can. > > Jargon Watch: > XSL: eXtensible Stylesheet Language (a language for > converting XML to output formats) > XSL-FO: a language for converting XML to (amongst other > things) print and PDF TeX and LaTeX: a typesetting language > (and variant) used by natural scientists (for the most part) > to typeset articles and books. > XML: an HTML-like language used for encoding text structurally. > SGML: an early version of XML > HTML: the language used to encode web pages > XPATH: an XML standard > TEI-L: mailing list of the Text Encoding Initiative > > -dan > > > > > > Peter Baker wrote: > > Dan, > > > > I won't try to cover any of the ground that John > McChesney-Young has > > covered in his post, except to say that that is also my > sense of the > > state of LaTeX right now: support for UTF-8 is still clunky, and > > Unicode/OpenType fonts are not natively supported. To judge > from its > > website the promising Omega project seems to have stalled. > > > > I'm wondering if you've considered XSL-FO as a way to get > from TEI to > > PDF. Apache's FOP (see http://xml.apache.org/fop/) is > supposed to be a > > good free implementation. If I recall correctly, earlier > versions of > > FOP used TeX or LaTeX to output PDF files, but now it > outputs directly > > to PDF. There's a great advantage to staying within XML to do a job > > like producing a PDF: you use an XSLT script to output an > FO file, and > > then send that to FOP. > > > > There are also commercial products for working with FO (here's one > > with a free academic license: > > http://www.renderx.com/download/academic.html), > > and some of them sound far easier to use than FOP. Being rather > > perverse, I'd probably stick with FOP myself. I'll bet there's some > > experience getting TEI to FOP on this list. > > > > Peter > > > > Daniel O'Donnell wrote: > > > >> The Digital Medievalist List (see end of message for contact > >> information and project URLs). > >> > >> ---------------------------------- > >> Hi all, > >> I've been playing with LaTex (actually MikTex) as a TEI2PDF > >> conversion method, and I have a question about unicode support for > >> LaTex that members of this list might have a better handle on than > >> the TUG group seems to. > >> What is the best method of handling UTF-8 XML code in LaTeX2e? > >> Recent discussion (i.e. Feb 2005) on the various mailing lists > >> archived at TUG seem to suggest this is something that is > difficult > >> to do and won't really be resolved until LaTeX 3. I'm sure members > >> here have some practical experience. > >> Thanks. > >> -dan > >> > >> P.S. I'm cross posting this in tei-l; apologies for the > double messages. > > > > > > > > -- > Daniel Paul O'Donnell, PhD > Associate Professor of English > University of Lethbridge > Lethbridge AB T1K 3M4 > Tel. (403) 329-2377 > Fax. (403) 382-7191 > E-mail <daniel.odonnell(a)uleth.ca> > Home Page <http://people.uleth.ca/~daniel.odonnell/> > The Digital Medievalist Project: <http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/> > > > _______________________________________________ > Digital Medievalist Project > Homepage: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org > Journal (December 2004-): > http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/journal.cfm > RSS (announcements) server: > http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/rss/rss2.cfm > Wiki: http://sql.uleth.ca/dmorgwiki/index.php > Change membership options: > http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/listinfo/dm-l > Submit RSS announcement: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/newitem.cfm > Contact editorial Board: digitalmedievalist(a)uleth.ca > dm-l mailing list > dm-l(a)uleth.ca > http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/listinfo/dm-l >

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TAN: Unicode, XML, and LaTeX
by Daniel O'Donnell 03 Apr '05

03 Apr '05

Hi all, I've been playing with LaTex (actually MikTex) as a TEI2PDF conversion method, and I have a question about unicode support for LaTex that members of this list might have a better handle on than the TUG group seems to. What is the best method of handling UTF-8 XML code in LaTeX2e? Recent discussion (i.e. Feb 2005) on the various mailing lists archived at TUG seem to suggest this is something that is difficult to do and won't really be resolved until LaTeX 3. I'm sure members here have some practical experience. Thanks. -dan P.S. I'm cross posting this in tei-l; apologies for the double messages. -- Daniel Paul O'Donnell, PhD Associate Professor of English University of Lethbridge Lethbridge AB T1K 3M4 Tel. (403) 329-2377 Fax. (403) 382-7191 E-mail <daniel.odonnell(a)uleth.ca> Home Page <http://people.uleth.ca/~daniel.odonnell/> The Digital Medievalist Project: <http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/>

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dm-l April 2005