[XeTeX] XeTeX maintenance

Philip Taylor P.Taylor at Rhul.Ac.Uk
Mon Apr 27 13:27:42 CEST 2015



Zdenek Wagner wrote:

> 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.

Yes, the element describes the structure; attributes such as those
you quote in the example above convey hints about its intended
appearance. There is no conflict -- software wishing to ascertain the
structure interrogates the elements; software wishing to depict the
structure visually can make use of the formatting attributes if it so
chooses.

> Generally you will print the information from the XML file in a 
> different order ...

Indeed we do; notes are taken out of the flow and re-set as end-notes.
This behaviour is unaffected by the use of formatting attributes.

> 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. 

That is /a/ methodology; there is nothing written in tablets of stone
that says that one is required to follow it.  The XML sources to which I
refer /could/ be processed using such a methodology, because the XML is
well-formed; in practice, it is far far simpler to implement an XML
parser and formatter using XeTeX, which is what I have elected to do.

** Phil.


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