olpa, OSS developer

I was a speaker at the TeX users meeting in Wuppertal, with the talk “Erfahrung und Vorhersagen für automatisches XML-nach-PDF-Publizieren mit TeX” (experience and prediction for automatical from-XML-to-PDF publishing using TeX).

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My paper “XML to paper publishing with manual intervention” is accepted for XATA 2010 (XML: Aplicações e Tecnologias Associadas), 19 and 20 May, Vila do Conde, Portugal. Abstract:

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To my great surprise, TeXML presentation was not accepted for XML Prague 2010. It’s so unexpected, that I’m even not upset, only puzzled. TeXML is one of a few projects which are somehow revolutionary. Seems it’s my fault I didn’t make it clear. The abstract, the reviews and conclusions follow.

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Bug (?) report: “after switching from LaTeX(pdflatex) to XeTeX(xelatex) as the PDF generator something has ceased to work. Mathematical operators given as unicode characters in math formulas do not show up in the final document.´´

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To put an image to a document, LaTeX provides the command “\includegraphics“. As it often happens, due to LaTeX was designed for manual typesetting, this command is a nightmare for automatic generation. For a long time, I use a wrapper to solve 99% of the problems.

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Do you generate [La]TeX files using Python? If yes, do you escape the special characters. Haven’t you forgotten to escape also empty strings?

To avoid reinventing the wheel, I tried to use TeXML libraries. This is the right choice, but one has to use a little trick.

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Due to a long period of inactivity in TeXML project, I’ve just been asked if the project is still supported. The answer is yes!

I use TeXML in production, it’s an important part of our new publishing process.

Why the project is inactive? Because no bugs are reported for the version 2.0.1, released on 19 July 2006 (today is 10 April 2008). If it works well, why bother to change anything?

A paper about TeXML and Consodoc is published in TUGboat 28:1, 2007: TeXML: Resurrecting TeX in the XML world. Also, the tools were presented as a poster at XML Prague 2007 conference: “XML to beautiful documents: TeXML and Consodoc“.

I like Prague, it’s a very beautiful city. My contribution to XML Prague 2007:
* paper “Generative XPath”
* presentation slides
* poster XML to beautiful documents, and how it looked like

In addition to my talk “Generative XPath” at XML Prague 2007, I decided to submit also a poster:

Title: XML to beautiful documents

Abstract: I’d like to present an alternative to XSL-FO. Using TeX to create PDF from XML is an old trick, but thanks to TeXML (an XML syntax for TeX) and Consodoc (a publishing server), the process is greately simplified and the produced documents are of high quality.

* http://getfo.org/texml/ — URL linking to a web page related to the poster.
* http://consodoc.com/

I’ve released a minor update of TeXML. I found that combination of the command-line flags “--ascii” and “--encoding” didn’t work as desired. Now TeXML attempts to write a symbol in the form “^^XX” first, and only then consults the rewritting maps.

Following the request in xml-dev:

What’s new/changed in 2.0?

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Finally, TeXML 2.0 is released.
Home: http://getfo.org/texml/
Tour: http://getfo.org/texml/tour_simple.html
Download: http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/getfo/texml-2.0.0.tar.gz

Finally, I’ve uploaded the new TeXML documetation for the upcoming version 2.0: http://getfo.org/texml/. And it seems I’ve forgotten to announce the version 2.0.0.beta1.

As part of the exhibition at XTech 2006, the organizers are reserving an area in the exhibition space for independent developers to show their work (via). I’ve submitted TeXML.
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I’ve got a question:

I’m pretty interested in the TeXML project, and would consider helping in the development. Could you tell me how active the project is at the moment, and where you think it is heading / what remains to be done?

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I’ve added a new feature to TeXML. Content of the element “pdf” is converted to utf16be and encoded using escape-sequences. It is useful for making PDF strings, in particular, for PDF bookmark strings.

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I’ve got feedback from Scott Prentice on recently released Tree Help plugin for FrameMaker. He has added the plugin to his leximation.com tools database. But it’s not important. MIFML — that is important. MIFML is an XML representation of a FrameMaker MIF file. Being the author of TeXML, an XML vocabulary for TeX, I’m sure that MIFML is a very good development.

The TeXML development version 1.27 brings new essential functionality: “--ascii” parameter. Now it’s possible to generate plain ASCII TeX files in a desired encoding. Non-ascii bytes are encoded as “^^XX“.

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Some time ago I got a complaint on TeXML: Bug in TeXML. Unfortunately, it’s not a bug in TeXML, but it’s a big bug in the LaTeX design.

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