Re: [DB2LaTeX-devel] TeXML, the XML vocabulary for TeX

[Torsten B. <br...@ph...>]

Halloechen!

Oleg Paraschenko <ol...@da...> writes:

> On Thu, 25 Mar 2004 12:42:49 +0100
> Torsten Bronger <br...@ph...> wrote:
>
>> [...]  Interesting, but how is it implemented?  In XSLT, or a
>> scripting language, or what?
>
> It is implemented in the Python scripting language.

I don't know Python.  How easy can this be installed on a Windows
system?

> It uses only core Python modules (expat XML parser, unicode
> database, something other), so it should work on any recent
> system. Mapping from Unicode characters to LaTeX commands is taken
> from attachment for the MathML specification
> (http://www.w3.org/Math/characters/unicode.xml (note: 1,5 Mb)).

And is it mode-aware?  Does an alpha become \alpha in formulae and a
Greek letter elsewhere?  What about ligatures like "--"?  Is this an
en-dash or two hyphens?  What about typographic things like thin
spaces, soft hyphens, zero-width non-joiner and "break permitted
here"?  How much of Unicode is covered yet?

>> How fast is it (I'm not prepared to accept a further significant
>> drop down in speed)?
>
> It is hard to said exactly, but I think it is fast. In any case,
> it should be faster then processing of specials by xslt.

Okay; I asked because using it would mean to translate
XML--XML-->text instead of XML-->text-->filter-->text, where
"filter" is *very* fast.  But faster than XSLT may be enough.

>> How are different \usepackage[???]{inputenc}'s dealt with?
>
> The processor does not know about \usepackage, it only translates
> characters. It is a task of an xslt to insert \usepackage command into
> the output, if required.

So I always have to include things like wasy, pifont, textcomp etc?
Wouldn't be a problem, I just need a complete list.

> User can specify an output encoding. The processor attempts to make as
> good translation as possible for it.

Sounds nice.  Are you aware of the very new utf-8 that was added to
the LaTeX core two months ago?  How good does it work?

Tschoe,
Torsten.

-- 
Torsten Bronger, aquisgrana, europa vetus