Re: [NTG-context] DocBook in ConTeXt - any new ideas?

I tried typesetting docbook with Context, it can be done, I but got stuck on the cals tables and some other things. Cals tables can be processed, albeit as separate documents only - not as part of the docbook file - and then imported as pdf files. This was too cumbersome for me, and does not agree with the tex philosophy. I therefore gave up. For some reason finetuning of, for example, the positioning of graphics, and headers as widows is more difficult than in a context document, at least I got this impression. Robert Op 2 jun 2011, om 22:20 heeft Hans Hagen het volgende geschreven:

On 2-6-2011 7:17, Bruce wrote:

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Hans Hagen writes:

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On 2-6-2011 12:53, Piotr Kopszak wrote:

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Many thanks for your reply! I would certainly go this way having a couple of months or a year perspective. Besides I'm eager to try finally the new way mkIV deals with xml. But realistically, preparing and testing a mapping of even a subset of DocBook is a question of at least a couple of personmonths if not worse. Sadly, I'm not in a position to that now.

Months? I never had a reason for doing a docbook mapping but a couple of hours should get you a start. Th eonly reason why I'd look into docbook is if I'd need in in a project. (I'd happily spent a few well paid months on it then.)

You probably don't need all of docbook, so you could start with some simple tests. The mkii docbook stuff you mentioned definitely is doing a small subset.

I never understand why you would try to typeset XML directly in ConTeXt? Why not just convert the DocBook to ConTeXt source using XSLT (or if the docs are simpler, use markdown with pandoc and you can easily get ConTeXt and HTML from the same source)?

(1) because xslt mappings can become pretty unreadable (2) because you still need to make a file (and define environments) (3) because it then create another depencency and intermediate processing stage (4) because sometimes it makes sense to let the typesetting engine make decisions (5) because in mkiv one can apply lua functions to xml content (6) ...

anyhow, the whole idea of xml is that it can be processed by whatever machinery (and using xslt and/or xsl-fo for everything kin dof contradicts that)

Hans

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