Re: XML to FrameMaker MIF via XSLT

On Sunday 17 February 2002 02:09, Rick Quatro wrote:

> My goal is to transform XML to FrameMaker's MIF
> format using XSL stylesheets. MIF is not XML so I assume I will have
> to use "text" output. 

Hi Rick,

Sorry I'm not answering your question directly, but rather asking more 
questions ;-)

I think what would really be useful and reusable would be an XSLT 
transform (+java extensions maybe) that goes from an "XMLization" of 
the MIF format to the actual format, say converting something like

<mif:document template="someMifTemplate.mif">
  <mif:para style="someMifStyle">
    This is some XML<mif:emdash/>generated MIF document
  </mif:para>
</mif:document>

to MIF.

Such a general XML-to-MIF transform would be very useful if integrated 
in a publishing framework like Cocoon (xml.apache.org/cocoon), to 
generate MIF documents on the fly.

At a company that I work we have developed a simple MIF library in 
java, that writes MIF documents based on a simple java API. We could 
probably donate this code to an Apache project if you'd like to build 
on it, might be easier than writing all MIF constructs in XSLT.

Note also that FOP (XSL-FO to PDF converter, xml.apache.org/fop) has a 
MIF renderer, but AFAIK it's not really usable as it stands.

Hope this helps!

-- 
 -- Bertrand Delacrétaz, www.codeconsult.ch
 -- web technologies consultant - OO, Java, XML, C++






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