Hi all, if you use <para indentation="none" looseness="1">Something...</para> you are not using XML properly. The purpose of XML is to describe the structure of a document, not its appearance. Generally you will print the information from the XML file in a different order or you will print just a part of it. As the second step you will run XSLT in order to extract the elements that have to be printed and finally XSL-FO in order to format the output. Of course you can combine these two steps into a single one and you can use other formatting engines instead of XSL-FO. On the contrary, the TeX primitives do not describe the document structure but ist appearance. LaTeX offers a kind of structural markup, eg \chapter, \section etc. Plain TeX users are supposed to invent such a markup themselves fr each docunebt or they can use OPmac developed by Petr Olšák.
XML may, of course, be used almost for everything. It helped me much when typesetting a book with pictures that have fixed places and the text is floating. It is described here: http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz/bharat.php I gave a lecture on this topic but only in Czech so the slides might be useless for you but you can look at the sources and XSLT stylesheets. I use a commercial font that cannot be distributed so uless you have it, you will not be able to compile the source, at least you will have to redefine the font. As I wrote, XML defines the document structure. When creating my web pages, I have all language variants in one XML file and XSLT builds 1 HTML file per language. For instance, this page is avaiable in three languages: http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz/ArunakashKaRasta/ The tools for creating the language versions are described here: http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz/webmake.php I have other applications of XML + TeX but if they are published, informatin is (unfortunatelly) only in Czech. Zdeněk Wagner http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/ http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz 2015-04-27 12:39 GMT+02:00 Philip Taylor <p.tay...@rhul.ac.uk>: > > > Joseph Wright wrote: > > On 27/04/2015 07:35, Philip Taylor wrote: > >> Going even further off-topic, but pursuing this one aspect of the > >> thread, is there not only real one problem : the need to educate users > >> to cease marking up their documents in raw (La)TeX syntax, and instead > >> to express them in well-formed XML ? I have just finished typesetting > >> (using [plain] XeTeX) a 544pp book marked up entirely in XML, and whilst > >> I have made no efforts to generate PDF/UA, I am convinced that the task > >> of so doing (assuming that the necessary primitives are or were > >> available in XeTeX) would have been 1/1000 of the effort needed to do so > >> had the book been marked up in traditional (La)TeX syntax with its usual > >> accompanying conflation of form and content. > > > > As Ross says in a parallel message, XML raises different issues and is > > not a panacea. For a start, we can ask if XML is a particularly good > > format not only here or for anything (there's a blog post by Linus > > Torvalds suggesting the answer is 'no'!). Assuming XML is at some level > > a good plan, that still doesn't make it a good plan for the end user nor > > ensure that the end sure will stick to logical structures. There's also > > the business that TeX is useful because sometimes we do need some visual > > adjustment or programming element. > > Let me address the last point first, because it is by far the easier to > rebut. In the 544pp book to which I referred earlier, there are > occasional places where TeX's typesetting system, in the absence of > explicit guidance, produces sub-optimal results. This is overcome at > the XML level by the simple expedient of attributes (where such can be > restricted to a single element): > > <Para indentation="none" vadjust="0,75" hbadness="4000"><image > status="active" vadjust="-1,8" source="FO+78-81-57-1813" repository="NA" > callout="Document_2"></image><foreign language="Greek">Διὰ τῆς παρούσης > μου ἀναφορᾶς ἀναφέρω τῇ ἐξοχότητί της, ὅτι κατὰ τὸ ͵αωαʹ ἔτος > > or of pragmats (where they may be required in a more general situation): > > <Para><pragmat code="\looseness = 1 \emergencystretch = 0,1 em > \tolerance = 9999 \hbadness = \tolerance \parfillskip = 0 pt plus > 0,3\hsize \relax"></pragmat>In April 1813 the then Patriarch of > <place>Jerusalem</place> <owner-individual > > indexterm="Polykarpos,_Patriarch_of_Jerusalem">Polykarpos</owner-individual> > (1808–27) wrote to <other-person indexterm="Liston,~Robert">Robert > Liston</other-person>, the British Ambassador in > > The former are used fairly frequently to optimise appearance; the latter > are used in only a very few places. > > As to whether "XML is a particularly good format not only here or for > anything", all I can say is that in my experience we (humanity, that is) > have not yet come up with anything better; LaTeX 2e, by explicitly > permitting the conflation of form and content, fails abysmally in this > respect (IMHO, of course). > > ** Phil. > > > -------------------------------------------------- > Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: > http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex >
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