Re: [Docutils-develop] Transforms...?

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Adam Chodorowski wrote:
> ... I want to do have news items on the same page for which I
> intended to utilize the bibliographic fields repeatedly (once for
> each news item, for since the author of each news item can vary and
> definately the date).

Be careful: although you can use "field lists" repeatedly in a
document, only the first field list (before anything but the document
title/subtitle) is converted into a **bibliographic** field list.

>> I can think of several ways to do what you describe:
...
>> Which were you thinking of?
>
> Something along the lines of (1), although I did not intend to write
> the index page in reST with special directives but rather write a
> script that calls the docutils tools to generate the full documents
> and extract the abstracts into files, which would then be
> concatenated with some extra HTML inserted before/after and between
> them.

Sounds reasonable.  You'll still need a specialized front-end to write
out both the full processed file and just the abstract.  No need for a
"transform" per se.  Perhaps a subclass of the HTML writer, which
knows how to special-case the abstract.  Either way, it would be a
customization that probably only you would use, and therefore doesn't
belong in Docutils.

>> The HTML writer already exposes the components, so you can just
>> grab the document body (everything inside but not including <body>
>> & </body>).  Use ``docutils.io.StringIO`` for the
>> "destination_class" parameter of
>> ``docutils.core.Publisher.__init__`` to avoid writing a file.
>
> Care to explain a little more?

After processing to HTML, ``writer.body`` (attribute "body" of the
Writer object) will contain the text (Unicode string) of the HTML
between <body> & </body> (excluding any output of the "header" and
"footer" nodes).  Combine that with a "docutils.io.StringIO" object
(or a soon-to-be-implemented "NullIO" object), and you can get just
the processed document body that you want.

> Perhaps I should take a closer look at the relevant sources.

Always helpful!

>> However, the idea of custom headers & footers is what inspired the
>> "decoration" element (which contains "header" & "footer" elements).
>> It hasn't been fully developed yet.
>
> Isn't that supposed to be a generic part of docutils for all kinds
> of writers? I am not so interested in that, since the "decorations"
> that I want for my online HTML version differ very greatly from the
> decorations I wish to have in the PDF (for example) version.

If that's the case, you'll have to do some custom coding.  Either
custom writers for your application, or custom format-sensitive
transforms activated via a "pending" element in the header/footer.
See "docutils.parsers.rst.directives.parts.contents" for an example.

Or a templating engine.

-- 
David Goodger  <go...@us...>  Open-source projects:
  - Python Docutils: http://docutils.sourceforge.net/
    (includes reStructuredText: http://docutils.sf.net/rst.html)
  - The Go Tools Project: http://gotools.sourceforge.net/