Re: [Vim-latex-devel] tex-refs project and xml to vim-help conversion

[Srinath A. <sr...@fa...>]

Hello,

Sorry for not writing earlier about this...

I downloaded 0.2.1 of the tex-refs xml source. It looks like you are
using the DocBook DTD.

See:
	http://www.docbook.org/tdg/en/html/docbook.html

But I am quite unclear about how exactly they process the xml source to
generate the various formats. It looks like they would use the docbook
xsl stylesheets available at

http://docbook.sourceforge.net/projects/xsl/

But thats about all I know... I do not know the details of which tools
they have used to apply the stylesheets etc. That would be helpful
information.... Actually a quick google search just revealed that
docbook recommends saxon which has a windows installer...

Another thing:

Since vim-help is plain text, it will be in general hard to create
stylesheets for it, because we will have to do all the rendering
ourselves. Therefore, it is of importance to know how many elements of
the docbook DTD definition the tex-refs project uses. Each new element
used will be more work.

For a simple vim help file itself, we need not more than a couple of
elements:

1. table
2. option
3. tag
4. para

and maybe a few more. If you take a look at the tex-refs.xml source, you
will see a much richer xml. Writing a custom xsl stylesheet to convert
that to plain text might be a huge undertaking.

Srinath

On Sun, 26 Jan 2003, Benji Fisher wrote:

> Peter:
>
>       A while ago, you wrote to the vim-latex group, asking for a
> volunteer to work on an XML-to-vim-help converter.  I think we are
> willing to give this a try.  Unfortunately, none of us has much
> experience in XML so far, so we would appreciate some pointers to help
> us get started:  XML, DocBook, XSLT.  Any advice will be appreciated.
>
> 					--Benji Fisher
>