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RE: Can XSLT produce binary output: ASN.1-BER

2002-11-22 07:23:56
Hi Peter,

I doubt you can do this. XSLT can not generate PDF directly, but
rather it can generate XSL-FO. You then need another engine (such
as FOP) to turn your XSL-FO into PDF. XSL-FO is an XML dialect for
describing page layouts.

You might be able to get close by being very careful about using
the text output mode, but you run into problems if you need to
generate certain bytes in the output. The difficulty is that XML
is character based, not byte-based. This means you output the
character 'A', not the byte 65 (being the ASCII representation of
'A'). Sure, if you need byte 65 and you are using an ASCII (or
ASCII-like) output encoding, you could get away with telling XSLT
to output an 'A', but this won't always work. Certain characters
(notably most of the "control" character which come before "space"
in the ASCII character set and are represented by byte codes less
than 32) are illegal in XML documents. This means that you have
absolutely no way of telling your XSLT processor to output the
byte value '0' (null), or the byte value '1', etc.

I hope that clears things up a little.

Dan.

-- 
Danny Yates
Technical Architect
Abbey National Treasury Services
E-mail: Danny(_dot_)Yates(_at_)ants(_dot_)co(_dot_)uk
Phone: +44 20 7756 5012
Fax: +44 20 7612 4342


-----Original Message-----
From: Reitberger Peter [mailto:peter(_dot_)reitberger(_at_)siemens(_dot_)com]
Sent: 22 November 2002 14:02
To: 'XSL-List(_at_)lists(_dot_)mulberrytech(_dot_)com'
Subject: [xsl] Can XSLT produce binary output: ASN.1-BER


I have a XML document and would like to transform it to ASN.1-BER. 
How would I do this with XSLT? 
The BER is a binary format but so is PDF. Therefore it should be possible?
Has anyone done that already?

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