[pmwiki-users] Bibliographies
christian.ridderstrom at gmail.com
christian.ridderstrom at gmail.com
Mon Sep 11 13:23:53 CDT 2006
On Mon, 11 Sep 2006, John Rankin wrote:
> I bow to your knowledge in this area. When we looked at whether to turn
> wiki markup into LaTeX directly or use an intermediate XML format, we
> observed the following:
> - it's not the markup that gets you, but the tables (sometimes these
> have to go into separate LaTeX files), the HTML entities, the images
> (these all have to be converted), the print metadata (what font to use,
> whether the document is single or double sided, and so on), the
> equations, and such like
Yeah... I can imagine that all these extras are a real bitch. One of the
strengths of LyX is that it has tools/scripts for converting images into
suitable formats. The whole package of files are then moved into a
separate, temporary directory, where LaTeX can finally parse the files. So
I understand that your wikipublisher is doing a *lot* of stuff more than
just generating a .tex-file. I assume you have to do all of the above...
> - wikistyles are really, really hard to handle -- mapping styles
> to their LaTeX equivalents is a challenge that we only partially
> overcame (example: coloured text that contains a url can in some
> cases cause LaTeX to die)
Is there some mechanism for definining the LaTeX equivalent of a
wikistyle? (Otherwise I probably wouldn't even try to support more than a
small subset of them). Hmm... maybe you could add a method that let's
people define the LaTeX equivalent of a wikistyle?
> - using an xml format means that you can detect (and discard) any
> spurius html tags that you didn't manage to catch (we use a namespace
> to qualify all the tags we insert, then remove any tags without a
> namespace, then remove the namespace) -- this is especially important
> when using third party cookbook recipes, which may insert hard-coded
> html tags
Clever!
> In the end we decided that pmwiki was designed to output xml and we were
> on safer ground by choosing to output xml. But I'm aware that this was a
> judgement made with very imperfect information and there may be a better
> way.
Oh... just to avoid misunderstandings, I never meant to imply that
wikipublisher shouldn't output XML. To me that sounds like a very good
choice. I only meant that if we don't care about images and other
complicating stuff, it's not that much difference in outputting the lyx
format immediately.
> I thought of yet another option: take the wikibook xml that we generate
> and use xsl to transform it to Lyx. I suspect that it would be
> relatively straightforward (if time-consuming) to modify the .xsl that
> converts the xml to LaTeX.
That's probably not so difficult as you say... but on the other hand it
seems a bit silly as LyX *will* move to an XML fileformat. And even if LyX
will be able to convert old .lyx-files (being backwards compatible), it
seems a bit silly...
/Christian
--
Christian Ridderström, +46-8-768 39 44 http://www.md.kth.se/~chr
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