Now Peter, I'm perfectly happy to take on this problem, but I think we both know that your demand that the transform be done in one pass makes it not so much "slightly more of a challenge" as "impossible." But what would be the problem with doing the transform in two passes, or three, or four? One could wrap them all up in some Python or Java, and the user wouldn't know or care. Assuming we can get past this little issue, why yes, I think it can be done, and I'll be happy to give it a try. Notice another qualification in my note: "when we've all got lots of time."
You know, I think that is my whole point.
There are indeed circumstances where the transform solution is very difficult. My document sample is one such. Notice that the first page break occurs some way into the document; and there is no explicit 'end of page' for the last page break. So figuring out the logic, by which you turn the empty page breaks into content-holding elements, is rather non-trivial. The transform solution is also going to be a real problem, for performance reasons, when you have documents of thousands of pages and you need to process them dynamically (*Not* pre-filter them through transforms). As for needing lots of time: if your tools let you do what you want directly with the document as it is, without the need for complex transforms, you don't need it.
I give a summary on why the system-we-have-not-named can handle this kind of problem easily, where XSLT can not, on http://anastasia.sourceforge.net/comparexsl.html. And, she-who-we-do-not-name can indeed do many of the things listed as XSLT no-nos on the http://www.dpawson.co.uk/xsl/sect2/nono.html pages (change variable values, create an xpath expression from a variable, move entities from the input to the output file, etc etc).
all the best Peter
Peter Robinson wrote:
You know, I think that is my whole point.
There are indeed circumstances where the transform solution is very difficult. My document sample is one such. Notice that the first page break occurs some way into the document; and there is no explicit 'end of page' for the last page break. So figuring out the logic, by which you turn the empty page breaks into content-holding elements, is rather non-trivial. The transform solution is also going to be a real problem, for performance reasons, when you have documents of thousands of pages and you need to process them dynamically (*Not* pre-filter them through transforms). As for needing lots of time: if your tools let you do what you want directly with the document as it is, without the need for complex transforms, you don't need it.
I give a summary on why the system-we-have-not-named can handle this kind of problem easily, where XSLT can not, on http://anastasia.sourceforge.net/comparexsl.html. And, she-who-we-do-not-name can indeed do many of the things listed as XSLT no-nos on the http://www.dpawson.co.uk/xsl/sect2/nono.html pages (change variable values, create an xpath expression from a variable, move entities from the input to the output file, etc etc).
all the best Peter
If "the whole point" refers to my comment about time, I have to disagree, because my time problem is about me, not about the tools. Lately I've been running out of the house with my shoes untied because I don't have time to tie 'em. But Peter Binkley appears to have addressed both the time issue and the one-pass issue. Let us study what he has done, and then discuss. My first impression is that Peter Binkley is a genius, while I am a rank amateur. My approach was going to be more like James Cummings's, though his steps towards a solution look about 100 times more elegant than what I would do.
Peter (Baker)
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Peter Baker -
Peter Robinson