On Sun, 10 Jun 2007, Pepe Barbe wrote:
Hello,
I have used ConTeXt in the past and I have been very pleased with it and the results obtained, much more than LaTeX.
Now I am looking into a solution that would allow me to layout the content ConTeXt and in other formats that ConTeXt does not (Forgive my ignorance, if I am wrong) output, like HTML, Plain Text, or RTF (Those are the formats that I can think of that are interesting to me currently).
Reading the Wiki one of those solutions would be XML, but I know very little about the subject, so this email is to ask about experiences in similar endeavors, other solutions for the same problem and how practical this is.
I have been exploring for something like this, but unfortunately have not found anything completely satisfactory. For "simple" documents, that is, only text, XML is the easiest. You have to determine a xml dtd, and then it is relatively easy to write context commands to parse it. It is also easy (but slightly cumbersome) to write a xsl stylesheet to parse xml into html. Most browsers do the xslt transformation on the fly. I found xml+css to be the easiest way to go, since you can do almost a one-to-one mapping of your ConTeXt commands. But most xml websites say that it is the "old" method and should not be used. To get plain text, you can do lynx -dump or something similar. I am sure there will be ways to convert xml to rtf, but I have not explored them. Some of the difficulties that I faced with simple documents was: 1. What is the xml equivalent of || 2. What is the xml equivalent of ~ ( ??) 3. What is the xml equivalent of \abbreviation {EECS} {Electrical Engineering and Computer Science} and then \EECS\ and \infull{EECS}. I did not have time to explore further, so I left my xml experiments there. For me the hardest part was to learn the xml way of thinking.
I suppose that I would use this for general writing and for academic as well (Maths and engineering).
For more complext documents (esp math), I do not like xml as an input format. Mathml is too verbose for me to write. Then there is the question of how useful is it to have a xml + mathml document. ConTeXt can parse it, and so can some of the browsers, but most browsers can not. Converting to html + images looks ugly, unless you put in a lot of effort. I have not tried converting xml+mathml to rtf or some office format. For complicated documents, I do not see the use of having an xml document. Most people are happy receiving a pdf. If someone wants to edit my files, and cannot edit tex file, he/she will not be able to edit xml files. If they use an office application to edit the file, I will need to backport the modifications manually. So he/she might as well use pdf annotation tools. If you do want to explore furhter, perhaps the easiest way is to use tex4ht, which does a decent job with most context documents and can convert to html, xml, and open office format. I do not like tex4ht because its html output is too verbose, and its documentation is a bit hard to follow. Aditya