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Subject: DocBook to proprietary DTD: basic advice sought
Hello, up-front: I am one of the developers of upCast and downCast, RTF<->XML conversion tools, and my questions are business-related. If this is not acceptable for this list, please let me know. Currently, I am investigating ways of converting DocBook to our proprietary DTD ("upCast DTD"). This DTD is essentially a mix of markup for the native structural possibilities and few layout features of RTF (think: "Word"). The difference to WordML is that the upCast DTD tries to be small, reprensting the logical document structure and non-verbose (as far as possible), and factors styling out to CSS. Basic WordML seems to be more of a re-formulation of RTF in XML syntax and holds formatting information inline as markup. I have collected the following points that influence the way a conversion could be done: 1. The DocBook XSLs are a de-facto standard, so I am facing the challenge that the output our conversion should create will be compared to/measured against the former's FO output. 2. Existing customization layers should probably be usable with reasonable adaptation effort. 3. Basing the conversion on the FO output, however, seems to lose many details which need to be put to good use in the target DTD, like: the 'role' attribute of paragraphs, <indexterm> element information, <title> status etc. These seem to no longer be present in the FO output (at least in the basic configuration). Therefore, this route does not seem viable. 4. The FO holds the styling information inline, whereas ideally, it should be factored out into a CSS stylesheet for our target DTD. 5. (X)HTML output seems to be much "nearer" to my target DTD, but still some "back-conversions" must be performed like recreating a <footnote> element from the <span>ned link and the contained reference to the content. However, role (=class) attributes are preserved nicely. 6. Being able to roundtrip the DocBook source document through Word (i.e., spooling out a DocBook document to Word for review/editing purposes, then converting it back to DocBook without structural changes) should happen whenever possible. (I am aware that there are situations where this will not be feasible.) My question is: Is there a (recommended?) way to leverage the basic calculations and the full-fledged element support of the DocBook XSLs for converting DocBook to one's own DTD? Is there some architectural layer in one of the output format implementations I could hook into? Or is trying to "plug in somewhere" probably going to be much more difficult than simply starting from scratch and trying to recreate FO output's layout in my own stylesheet? I guess that requirement 6 above is actually what will make the latter almost necessary. So I am interested in any experience from those of you who have targetted their own DTD from DocBook and those who are much more intimate with the internal structure of the DocBook XSLs than I am to hear whether plugging into one of it is possible or worthwhile. Kind regards Christian Roth Link to basic documentation on the target DTD (="upCast DTD"): <http://www.infinity-loop.de/support/documentation/dtd/> Actual DTD (concise namespaced version): <http://www.infinity-loop.de/DTD/upcast/5.0/upcastNS.dtd> -- Christian Roth (CTO) Phone: +49 89 890432-95 Web : http://www.infinity-loop.de infinity-loop GmbH * Neideckstr. 25 * 81249 München * Germany
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