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Re: weird formatting and characters with <xsl:text di

Subject: Re: weird formatting and characters with <xsl:text disable-output-escaping>
From: Wendell Piez <wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 26 Apr 2005 18:27:36 -0400
indesign templates
Spencer,

At 06:10 PM 4/26/2005, you wrote:
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.

That's the "clean" solution, and possibly the easiest even in the short term. (Definitely over the long term, if you have to maintain and extend.) Mind you, the final conversion might still be in XSLT. The point here is that you have options.


 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.

Hrm: then you're confessedly going against what the designers of the application provided for -- which isn't to say it's impossible, just that all bets are off. (The price of not accepting help from the application is that the application then doesn't give you any help.)


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.

I did glance at the original post, but saw that (a) it was nasty (not XML), and (b) others were addressing the question. (It's great that there are so many competent practitioners on the list.)


To be clear, however, you'd use *either* output-method="text" *or* d-o-e. (When you use output-method="text" everything comes out as if by d-o-e, automatically.) Given the nature of the problem, I think I'd follow Mike's advice and design a two-step solution:

step 1: XML -> XML transform making something that cleanly represents the output format, as an XML tree. (If you're lucky this could be quite close to your final format.)

step 2: XML -> text transform passing the XML results from step 1 through a plain-text formatter designed to produce the necessary syntax.

If your intermediate format is designed well enough, the transform for step 2 would be a simple little thing. But designing it could be quite tricky, requiring an understanding of both the "what" and the "why" of the target format -- which may be undocumented and under legal restrictions as well (IANAL).

Good luck,
Wendell


====================================================================== Wendell Piez mailto:wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 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 ======================================================================

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