[l2h] General HTML generation questions

Fred L. Drake, Jr. fdrake@acm.org
Wed, 5 Jun 2002 00:38:10 -0400


Ross Moore writes:
 > Please send an example of the coding that you are using.
 > This could be quite delicate.

This most certainly is!  I think some of the general fragility here
was introduced for the benefit of some of the elaborate optional args
to \item that we use for the Python documentation.  I'll be glad to
test a patch related to this on the standard Python documentation,
where we encountered our problems with this.

 > This is a *very hard* problem to solve, as LaTeX does not provive explicit
 > markup for the start/end of paragraphs.

Very painful indeed.  I have a set of scripts that convert the Python
documentation from LaTeX to XML (mostly), and the most painful part
was marking paragraphs properly.  Unfortunately, there was nothing
general about the script that does that part of the transformation; it
requires deep knowledge about the markup we use in the Python docs,
and is perhaps the most painful DOM code I've written.  (No, you
probably *don't* want to know how I got the LaTeX documents into a DOM
object!)


  -Fred

-- 
Fred L. Drake, Jr.  <fdrake at acm.org>
PythonLabs at Zope Corporation