Chris,
At 05:30 AM 4/27/2005, Jirka wrote:
I would like to know if it is possible to use XSLT to create a
document, like the above example, from an XML file.
I'm still new to XSL/T so i'm not really sure of its limitations, or
even if this is something i should be attempting with with it.
When i think about it transforming to plain text doesn't sound right,
but some expert opinions would be good :)
XSLT doesn't have any built-in support for wrapping paragraphs and
layouting tables. You can do this sort of task in XSLT, but it is a lot of
work.
I would suggest you little bit different approach. Write stylesheet that
will produce HTML output from your XML files. Then use some text-based web
browser (lynx, links, ...) to render this HTML into plain text. This way
HTML browser will take care of laying out text -- which is the hardest
part of your problem.
I endorse this approach if you can find a renderer that will make the plain
text you want. Essentially it's the solution Mike suggested, except HTML is
used as the intermediate format and an off-the-shelf tool is used to
provide the plain text formatting in step 2.
In a pinch, for a one-off, you can even use a browser's "Save As" for this. :->
What makes this tricky is that by "plain text" people often mean not text
that's very plain, but ASCII-art-like text that is plain only in the sense
that it's free of any markup or encoding whatsoever (apart from the text
itself) ... as always it depends on the requirements.
Cheers,
Wendell
======================================================================
Wendell Piez
mailto:wapiez(_at_)mulberrytech(_dot_)com
Mulberry Technologies, Inc. http://www.mulberrytech.com
17 West Jefferson Street Direct Phone: 301/315-9635
Suite 207 Phone: 301/315-9631
Rockville, MD 20850 Fax: 301/315-8285
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Mulberry Technologies: A Consultancy Specializing in SGML and XML
======================================================================
--~------------------------------------------------------------------
XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list
To unsubscribe, go to: http://lists.mulberrytech.com/xsl-list/
or e-mail: <mailto:xsl-list-unsubscribe(_at_)lists(_dot_)mulberrytech(_dot_)com>
--~--