[texhax] XMLTex

[William F Hammond]

William Adams writes:

> On Jun 7, 2012, at 3:03 AM, Varaprasad Bodducherla, Prakash Rao wrote:
>
>> When can we expect latex3 (with full xmltex) in the market?
>
> AIUI, XMLtex isn't a formal part of the LaTeX project ---
> it's ``just'' a package of macros.

> Typesetting from XML directly seems a lot more
> straight-forward on the surface than using an XSLT to
> convert to TeX which is the usual suggestion....

XSLT is most convenient for translating one XML document
type to another.  It is not so good for writing any form
of TeX.

For translation of XML to LaTeX -- which is quite viable --
or to Context, think rather in terms of what
(cross-platform) language you want to use for writing the
translator and then what library you want to use for
assistance in that.

xmltex uses TeX as the engine for translating to DVI (or
PDF), but I have felt somewhat shackled trying to use it.

Except for very high speed industrial work where something
like 'C' is required I prefer the "sgmlspl.pl" interface to
SGMLS.pm (Perl).  (I took up this route in 1998.  If
starting today, a Python framework might make more sense.)

One more point: Short of writing a translator from document
type X to LaTeX or Context, think about writing a translator
from document type X to document type Y, where translations
to either LaTeX or Context already exist for document type
Y.  (You will likely want to make small changes to Y or to
those translators.)  As long as validation of intermediate
XML stages is performed, chaining translations in this way
is reliable.  An example for Y is
http://www.albany.edu/~hammond/gellmu/xml/axgellmu.dtd

                                    -- Bill