Hi Michael and Wendell,
Thanks for the advice. I like Michael's idea of defining some form of
representation of the output and doing the final conversion with some
other language. Your serialization suggestion also sounds interesting
so perhaps I will spend a bit of time diving into that. Wendell as you
suggested xml can be imported into InDesign however I have found this
method to be problamatic and my end-users are used to placing tagged
text files into there various InDesign templates.
Also Michael mentioned using output-method="text" and "disable-output
escaping" this is what I tried to do in my original attempt, but came
up with badly formatted output. If you have a sec and check out my
original post maybe there is a way to get the text at least into some
nicely formatted form.
Either or, I appreciate all the advice and suggestions,
Spencer
On 4/26/05, Michael Kay <mike(_at_)saxonica(_dot_)com> wrote:
Shoot just realized we can't even do that as InDesign uses mandatory
nested tags to define paragraph styles, like <this is a tag<this is a
nested tag>>, so perhaps I will have to look at this all another way??
This is the general problem of generating output in a format that has a
passing resemblance to XML but is not actually XML. There are a surprising
number of such formats still in use (some of them, of course, are valid
SGML). There are a number of choices available:
(a) define an XML representation of the required output and generate that
using XSLT. Then write a converter in some other language to convert this
XML to the target form.
(b) write a stylesheet that outputs text (xsl:output method="text")
(c) write a stylesheet that outputs a mixture of XML and text (xsl:output
method="xml" with disable-output-escaping). Messy but sometimes pragmatic.
(d) implement a custom serialization method. If you have some Java skills,
this isn't as daunting as it may sound, for example in Saxon you can do it
by subclassing the serializer that comes with the product.
The main thing is to try and keep the peculiarities contained to as small a
part of your code as you can. I'd suggest going for (a) if you can.
Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/
--~------------------------------------------------------------------
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>
--~--
--~------------------------------------------------------------------
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>
--~--