On Wed, Jul 28, 2004 at 08:47:47AM +0200, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
On mar, 2004-07-27 at 23:23 -0500, Paul DuBois wrote:
The DocBook XSL stylesheets can produce FO, HTML, XHTML, ... but
I'm wondering: What's a good way to produce plain text?
My searches thus far turn up things like sgmltools-lite and docbook2X,
but I'm interested in XML DocBook, not SGML DocBook, and I prefer not
to use something that requires Jade or DSSSL.
One option is to use the DocBook stylesheets to produce HTML, then
run that through lynx -dump to generate plain text. Are there other
useful approaches? What do *you* do?
If I had to do it once that'd be HTML + lynx -dump.
For anything more repetitive I'd write a custom XSLT stylesheet -
outputing plain text seems a lot easier than the transforms the current
stylesheets do now.
I agree that it seems like it should be much easier. That's one reason
I'm puzzled that such a thing doesn't seem to exist.
Is it just that no one is interested in producing plain text? (For example,
to produce README files and such from a distribution's general DocBook
documentation sources?) Or is the need little enough that lynx -dump
is good enough for people's purposes?
Of course, that depends on your xslt experience and the time you can
allocate. If you need a good control of the outputed text nothing will
beat an XSL IMHO.
True, but naturally I had hoped to avoid writing such a thing myself. :-)
Maybe it'd be easier to write a transform to convert DocBook to atox
format and let atox handle it ...