Re: [Db2latex-devel] Re: normalize-scape.mod.xsl

[James D. <j-d...@us...>]

Hi Vitaly,

New ideas are welcome -- and it would be great for us to improve
language support -- but each idea needs to be assessed for its
practical value.

In message <200...@vz...>
on Wed, Jul 02, 2003 at 03:03:49PM +0400, Vitaly Ostanin wrote:
> > I, too, would like to have had this. But DocBook XSL
> > stylesheets, in general, are slow enough already. The problem
> > with using a recursive template is that it can easily increase
> > processing time by a factor of five. 
> 
> You right, modified style is slow, but XSLT is not for speed.

It's not for slownees, either! :)

> > we will still use the long, monolithic "scape"
> > template but it will be generated from a mapping file (not
> > hand-coded).
> 
> I'm not sure, that is the right way.

From what I have seen, it is the most practical way so far.

> > > LaTeX doesn't support unicode characters by their numbers,
> > > so each character need to be translated into valid latex.
> > 
> > I haven't found that to be possible (but I'm not an XSLT
> > expert). 
> 
> It's easily doing with characters mapping, without any
> extensions.

I don't believe you! If you can find someone who has demonstrated that
it is practical (or can explain how it could be done)  that would help
us find a new solution for DB2LaTeX. As far as I can see, you're
suggesting that we use substring(...) to iterate over every character in
text() nodes and then do lookups in a 65000-element mapping document
(most characters will require LaTeX packages to be loaded -- so there is
always a need for a LaTeX-based solution). It simply isn't practical
(time, space, software support) to do that.