Re: DocBook to LaTex?

[Jochem Huhmann <joh@gmx.net>]

 * Sylvan Ravinet <sylvan@ravinet.com> wrote:
> Jochem Huhmann wrote:
> 
> > > > ftp://ftp.sol.no/public/users/v/vigu/sgml/dtd/docbook/docbk2latex.pl
> > It's no more there, yes. And I don't have a copy of it either. This
> > script was quite primitive btw, everyone with a scriptable parser (perl,
> > python, tcl...)  and some knowlegde of DocBook and LaTeX should be able
> > to write a script that converts a given instance of (a subset of)
> > DocBook.
> 
> So what would be the "design" of such a script? I can think of some
> regexps, but maybe it's not the best way (I never manipulated any XML
> parser)

You don't have to dig around in the sgml with regexps yourself. Look for
readily available packages for your favourite scripting language (I like
tclxml by Steve Ball a lot) and look at the documentation. It's quite
simple, I've hacked up a script to convert the contents of the
revhistory element to HTML this morning, just 50 lines of code,
including HTML headers and such.

> >And I'm quite sure that a lot of people have written such
> > throw-away scripts.
> 
> Then people please tell us about - or throw us - yours! :-)

Such scripts tend to be ugly, undocumented and thrown away as early as
possible ;-) Especially my scripts, since I'm actually not a programmer.

> >The hard part is covering *all* DocBook markup in a
> > meaningful way and building LaTeX constructs from this which make
> > typographically sense. But I would like to see at least a extensible
> > framework to do such a conversion too.
> 
> I can spend some little time on this, if we and others wanna join.

I guess the best thing one could do to get a start is to start
coding. But since the ways to get a result for a given problem as fast
as possible or to get a solid framework are quite different...

> Jade and JadeTex are definitely not my cup of tea...

I'm quite lucky these are available at all. But I've never really tried
to understand JadeTex.



        Jochem

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