[bitc-dev] XSLT question

[Dominique Quatravaux]

Jonathan S. Shapiro wrote:

>Dominique:
>
>Bother. db2latex doesn't really help me that much, since I'm not doing
>docbook.
>
But OTOH it is written in XSLT so the tricks it uses to deal with 
whitespace are of interest, if you can understand the code (I barely can).

Aren't we misunderstanding each other there? My previous post talked 
about two *different* DocBook -> LaTeX stylesheets:

http://www.idealx.org/DocBkXML2LaTeX/ -> written in Perl -> my stuff
http://db2latex.sourceforge.net/ -> written in XSLT -> works too, I 
tested it

The latter somehow manages to do whitespace correctly so it has to be 
possible using XSLT too :-).

In my previous email I was highlighting some incomplete findings I made 
in db2latex's source while trying to answer your XSLT questions, so that 
you can dig further. I mentioned Perl only as a self-serving plug, 
apologies for disturbing the mindflow with that.

>I just can't stand Perl.
>  
>
I'm not surprised :-) Although one can do clean, functional-style 
programming in Perl too (I did, for my stylesheet), it simply is too 
easy to cut corners with it to manage the kind of software quality 
requirements we have all come to expect from you.

>>From your description, though, it sounds like you used some pre-existing
>module to normalize whitespace?
>  
>
Uh, no. See above.

Regards,

-- 
<< Tout n'y est pas parfait, mais on y honore certainement les jardiniers >>

			Dominique Quatravaux <dom at kilimandjaro.dyndns.org>