From: Aahz <aa...@py...> - 2004-02-26 21:34:08
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On Tue, Feb 24, 2004, Stephan Deibel wrote: > From: Aahz <aa...@py...> >> >> The problem is that current reST writers aren't paramaterized for >> handling named styles the way Word and Frame expect things, particularly >> for those of us who need to emit documents that fit templates designed by >> other people. In addition, there needs to be a system similar to the >> way CSS works for outputting the actual style info into binary files. > > I've got a writer that basically does this, although it's outputting text > + a list of marks on the text each of which has a start/end range and a > style (and optional callback since I'm using this ultimately for screen > display w/ links). This seems like perhaps close to the the right > intermediate step all binary writers could have in common, with a second > pass for outputting? Maybe I'm not understanding you, but I don't see how this is similar to what I'm talking about. Let me give an example: Suppose author A is writing a book for publisher X, and author B is writing a book for publisher Y. Both want their books in MS Word format. X wants chapter titles to have a "CH" style, but Y wants chapter titles to have a "Header1" style. reST currently has no way to handle this other than rewriting the Word writer for each book. But the same issue holds if publisher Y switches to Frame as its preferred doc format. So there's a need for a generic mechanism to manage this. -- Aahz (aa...@py...) <*> http://www.pythoncraft.com/ "Do not taunt happy fun for loops. Do not change lists you are looping over." --Remco Gerlich, comp.lang.python |
From: Stephan D. <sd...@wi...> - 2004-02-26 22:58:08
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On Thu, 26 Feb 2004, Aahz wrote: > On Tue, Feb 24, 2004, Stephan Deibel wrote: > > From: Aahz <aa...@py...> > >> > >> The problem is that current reST writers aren't paramaterized for > >> handling named styles the way Word and Frame expect things, particularly > >> for those of us who need to emit documents that fit templates designed by > >> other people. In addition, there needs to be a system similar to the > >> way CSS works for outputting the actual style info into binary files. > > > > I've got a writer that basically does this, although it's outputting text > > + a list of marks on the text each of which has a start/end range and a > > style (and optional callback since I'm using this ultimately for screen > > display w/ links). This seems like perhaps close to the the right > > intermediate step all binary writers could have in common, with a second > > pass for outputting? > > Maybe I'm not understanding you, but I don't see how this is similar to > what I'm talking about. Let me give an example: Suppose author A is > writing a book for publisher X, and author B is writing a book for > publisher Y. Both want their books in MS Word format. X wants chapter > titles to have a "CH" style, but Y wants chapter titles to have a > "Header1" style. reST currently has no way to handle this other than > rewriting the Word writer for each book. > > But the same issue holds if publisher Y switches to Frame as its > preferred doc format. So there's a need for a generic mechanism to > manage this. Since you mentioned both Word and Frame, I was thinking along the lines of a shared preprocessor and my initial (perhaps simplistic) take on that was that it would output text plus a list of (start, end, style_name) markup where the style_names are ReSTish styles like header-1, header-1, literal, emphasis, note, etc. Then a second stage would take that and convert it into Word or Frame using a mapping from the ReST styles to the ones your publisher wants. This may fall down if the shared intermediate writer is harder to write than adding additional support to ReST, or if the Word or Frame writers need more information than text + markup list (I've no real knowledge of these formats). Anyway, if you did write a simple shared intermediate step like this it would basically be the writer that I have, which is why I mentioned it. Sorry for the lack of clarity... - Stephan |
From: Aahz <aa...@py...> - 2004-02-28 01:51:40
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On Thu, Feb 26, 2004, Stephan Deibel wrote: > > Since you mentioned both Word and Frame, I was thinking along the lines > of a shared preprocessor and my initial (perhaps simplistic) take on that > was that it would output text plus a list of (start, end, style_name) > markup where the style_names are ReSTish styles like header-1, header-1, > literal, emphasis, note, etc. Then a second stage would take that and > convert it into Word or Frame using a mapping from the ReST styles to > the ones your publisher wants. From my POV, the internal reST structure *is* the intermediate format. > This may fall down if the shared intermediate writer is harder to write > than adding additional support to ReST, or if the Word or Frame writers > need more information than text + markup list (I've no real knowledge > of these formats). Technically, the actual formats are OpenOffice.org XML and MIF (Frame's text format that's an awful lot like XML). They have roughly similar capabilities; what's different is the precise output format. What I'm proposing is essentially a structure parallel to the standard docutils writer that abstracts out the varying stuff. -- Aahz (aa...@py...) <*> http://www.pythoncraft.com/ "Do not taunt happy fun for loops. Do not change lists you are looping over." --Remco Gerlich, comp.lang.python |