Re: [DB2LaTeX-devel] Status of project, and where to next

[nico <nic...@li...>]

On Thu, 28 Apr 2005 07:37:53 +0200, Torsten Bronger  
<br...@ph...> wrote:

> Hallöchen!

Salut ! ;-)
>
> nico <nic...@li...> writes:
>
>> [...]
>>
>> Well, the perl processing is used for three purposes:
>>
>> - for fast systematic string replacement, e.g. a "\" is change to
>> a "\\" to make latex happy. Doing this task with XSL is quite
>> possible but really slow. I wanted something really faster because
>> I need to drive books containing more than 200 pages. This said,
>> maybe that EXSL functions now exist that can do this far
>> better. Is it the case?
>
> I don't know EXSL well enough, but while I too had once thought that
> it's good to have everything in XSLT, I quickly realised that
> there's always the right tool for the right purpose, and doing
> everything in XSLT means that you do it sub-optimally in one way or
> the other.

That's why I use the perl processing, indeed.
>
> So I wrote tbrplent (in C++) which replaces UTF-8 sequences with
> LaTeX commands.  It works well.  The idea is that the XSLT
> stylesheet deploys delimiters.  Every text node is enclosed by them,
> every formula, and every text-within-formula.  So the replacements
> can fit in their context.  My XSLT typically contains:

That's exactly the way I do.
>
> <xsl:variable name="start-delimiter" select="'&#x98;'"/>
> <xsl:variable name="end-delimiter" select="'&#x9c;'"/>
>
> <xsl:template match="text()" priority="0">
>   <xsl:value-of select="$start-delimiter"/>
>   <xsl:value-of select="."/>
>   <xsl:value-of select="$end-delimiter"/>
> </xsl:template>
>
> Unfortunately, my ambitions have grown since then, and I plan a
> re-write.  I needed three pairs of delimiters, but I want to replace
> them by one pair plus numerical parameter, in order to have as many
> "modes" as I need.  For example, there must be a special mode for
> headings, because in PDF bookmarks some characters must be written
> differently.

I understand.
>
> tbrplent was written for my tbook project ("TBook RePLace ENTities),
> but I now use it for texi2latex, too.
>
> If you are interested, we can try a re-implementation (under a new
> name) together.  It's not a big thing after all.  The replacement
> tables exist already, they just need to be expanded to the new
> modes.  And we have to decide for a language.  I planed to use
> Python, but probably most of you are Perl hackers.

Yes it's interesting. Personally I would vote for Python: powerfull, clean  
and maintanable code, well suited for text processing, compilable if hard  
performance is needed, available on almost every platform.
>
> C++ would produce a small executable program, which is especially
> pleasing for a Windows distribution.  Since no regexes are involved,
> it should be as easy to program and as fast as in Perl.  So I vote
> for C++.
>
> Tschö,
> Torsten.
>
Regards,

BG