[Tugindia] Conversion Program in PlainTeX

Radhakrishnan CV cvr at river-valley.org
Tue Dec 9 08:04:19 CET 2003


>>>>> "Navinraj" == Navinraj  <nj_navin at yahoo.com> writes:

    Navinraj> Dear All I am working in a book, which client will be
    Navinraj> providing xml input file based on docbook.dtd. Client
    Navinraj> needs the document to be processed in plaintex.

    Navinraj> This project contains lot of chapters, so we thought of
    Navinraj> creating a program (Perl, VB or C++) that converts xml
    Navinraj> coding to TeX coding.

That is one of the options which you can surely adopt. However, XSLT
is much more XML grammar aware processor, as such you would benefit a
lot.  You might take a look at Norman Walsh's site at:

  http://nwalsh.com/

He has done a lot of work on DocBook DTD (both SGML and XML) for
transformation to other formats using XSLT.

    Navinraj> I hope in PlainTeX it is possible to Write Conversion
    Navinraj> Program (XML to TeX), 

Why should TeX convert XML to TeX and process? It can very well
process your XML straight forwardedly.  Take a look at David
Carlisle's XMLTeX (search at CTAN) which can easily process your XML
document using LaTeX.  If you are insistent on Plain TeX, you might
prefer ConTeXt macro package of Hans Hagen rather than XMLTeX.  If
not, you will end up writing a whole macro package like LaTeX or
ConTeXt to process the chapters and other heading levels, floats,
images, cross-references, bibliographic items etc., thereby loosing
thousands of manhours' work done by many intelligent programmers world
wide hitherto.

Best regards

Radhakrishnan


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