Passive TeX

Date:      Fri, 9 Jul 1999 16:08:12 CDT
From:      Sebastian Rahtz <sebastian.rahtz@computing-services.oxford.ac.uk>
To:        TEI-L@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU
Subject:   Passive TeX: using TeX to format XSL Formatting Objects

I have placed some preliminary material on

http://users.ox.ac.uk/~rahtz/passivetex/

which is the first public airing of an attempt to implement the XSL specification relating to formatting objects. Having reaching the stage where I can process the TEI Lite Guidelines with apparently reasonable results, I thought it would be nice to show what can be done.

This system works in two stages:

a) apply an XSL stylesheet to the XML document and generate a new XML file containing XSL <fo:... markup

b) process that file with a special TeX (pdfTeX) format to generate a formatted PDF file

The idea plainly works; the difficulties come when you try to express in TeX all the weird and wonderful things allowed for in XSL. I expect to meet some of the same impasses that JadeTeX has found.

If some of the TEI community find this of interest, let me know which features you need implementing to do something useful.

Sebastian Rahtz

Prepared by Robin Cover for the The SGML/XML Web Page archive.

SEARCH Advanced Search ABOUT Site Map CP RSS Channel Contact Us Sponsoring CP About Our Sponsors NEWS Cover Stories Articles & Papers Press Releases CORE STANDARDS XML SGML Schemas XSL/XSLT/XPath XLink XML Query CSS SVG TECHNOLOGY REPORTS XML Applications General Apps Government Apps Academic Apps EVENTS LIBRARY Introductions FAQs Bibliography Technology and Society Semantics Tech Topics Software Related Standards Historic	Passive TeX Date: Fri, 9 Jul 1999 16:08:12 CDT From: Sebastian Rahtz <sebastian.rahtz@computing-services.oxford.ac.uk> To: TEI-L@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU Subject: Passive TeX: using TeX to format XSL Formatting Objects I have placed some preliminary material on http://users.ox.ac.uk/~rahtz/passivetex/ which is the first public airing of an attempt to implement the XSL specification relating to formatting objects. Having reaching the stage where I can process the TEI Lite Guidelines with apparently reasonable results, I thought it would be nice to show what can be done. This system works in two stages: a) apply an XSL stylesheet to the XML document and generate a new XML file containing XSL `<fo:...` markup b) process that file with a special TeX (pdfTeX) format to generate a formatted PDF file The idea plainly works; the difficulties come when you try to express in TeX all the weird and wonderful things allowed for in XSL. I expect to meet some of the same impasses that JadeTeX has found. If some of the TEI community find this of interest, let me know which features you need implementing to do something useful. Sebastian Rahtz Prepared by Robin Cover for the The SGML/XML Web Page archive.