olpa, OSS developer

Shame on me. The TeXML processor had a bug in the core functionality.

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In comp.text.tex, Tristan Miller asked:

Can anyone recommend some small to medium-sized open problems which satisfy all of the four points below?

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TeXML’s mailing list “Getfo-general” presents now on gmane.org.

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While communicating about making TeXML distribution archives, I’ve got examples of powerful use of “setup.py”.

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I wanted to work on generative XML, but I had to answer a letter from Paul Tremblay about new release of TeXML. Answering developed into working on TeXML.

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After making a lot of contributions, Paul Tremblay have joined the TeXML project. Welcome!

I’ve got a feature request to add namespaces to TeXML. Reasons are very strong, so I can’t reject the proposal. Here is my answer:

I though about namespaces at the very beginning, and decided to avoid namespaces to simplify TeXML. The namespaces is a dark corner of XML technologies for many developers.

> the problem of trying to reconcile XML with a namespace and XML without a namespace.

Unbeatable point! Well, let assign a namespace URI for TeXML:

http://getfo.sourceforge.net/texml/

The namespace prefix is not important, but I think the best variant is “texml”. So a TeXML document may look like this:

<texml:TeXML xmlns:texml="http://getfo.sourceforge.net/texml/">...</texml>

I don’t want force user to use TeXML namespace, so I’m going to introduce modes of processing:

* namespace-aware, and
* no namespaces, as now.

About technical implementation. I’d like to update “glue_handler” in the file “handler.py”: let handler “startElementNS” validates “uri” (it should be None or TeXML’s URI), creates new attributes map as there are no namespaces (maybe it’s not required, need to read documentation), and delegates processing to “startElement”. The same is for “endElementNS”.

I suppose all these actions slow down the conversion, so I’d like to enable namespaces feature only on demand (for example, “-ns” command line flag).

What do you think about it?

New software was recently announced in comp.text.tex:

WordML2LaTeX is a meeting point between two titans in word processing: Microsoft Word 2003 and LaTeX2e. It is a XSL stylesheet that transforms a Word document (WordML) in a LaTeX2e source. With it You can use Word as a front end for LaTeX.

It converts XML to LaTeX and it doesn’t use TeXML! Very pity. I’ve written a letter to the author:

To:   ruggdam@....it
Subj: WordML2LaTeX with TeXML?

Hello Ruggero,

I’ve noticed an announce of WordML2LaTeX in comp.text.tex and looked at it. I can’t check how it works as I have no WordML documents. Anyway, the stylesheet looks impressive and interesting for me.

I noticed that you create TeX markup directly from XSLT. This is the reason why I’m writing to you: I’d like to advocate TeXML:

http://getfo.sourceforge.net/texml/

It was created specialy for XML to TeX translation, and I totally satisfied with it. I’m not alone. For example, see:

http://contextgarden.net/Getting_Started_with_XML_and_ConTeXt_using_TEXML

So I’d like to convince you of the using TeXML in the next version of WordML2LaTeX.

Regards, Oleg

By the way, the stylesheet looks good and covers many formatting issues. The software is available on CTAN in the folder “/support/WordML2LaTeX/” (for example, here).

Nice news from Paul Tremblay. He submitted patches to TeXML. The first one allows to install TeXML in the normal Pythonic way:

python setup.py build
python setup.py install

The patch description.

Other patches deal with the vertical bar symbol (“|”). Haven’t seen them yet.

Hope to find a bit of free time to integrate all to CVS.

Paul Tremblay has published an article for XML authors who want to use open source software to produce high quality PDF documents. He suggests using ConTeXt, a variation of TeX, and advocates using TeXML for conversion of XML to ConTeXt:

http://contextgarden.net/Getting_Started_with_XML_and_ConTeXt

And I’ve added some comments on the article:

http://contextgarden.net/Talk:Getting_Started_with_XML_and_ConTeXt

I’m happy to see that TeXML becomes popular, and not only because I’m the author, but also because I really believe in the benefits of TeXML.

Meanwhile I released TeXML 1.23 development version with ConTeXt support. Unfortunately, documentation is not updated yet.

First of all, let me introduce TeXML:

TeXML is an XML vocabulary for TeX. The processor transforms TeXML markup into the TeX markup, escaping special and out-of-encoding characters. The intended audience is developers who automatically generate TeX files.

* home page: http://getfo.sourceforge.net/texml/
* SourceForge page: http://sourceforge.net/projects/getfo/