Re: [xmlroff] FO and Area Tree browser proposal

[Tony G. <Ton...@Su...>]

Dave Malcolm wrote at  8 Mar 2003 16:44:48 +0000:
 > Please forgive my ignorance, but is there a standard DTD for the area tree 
 > stage?  That way you can just serialise the area tree as XML, and the 

There isn't a standard DTD for the area tree.

It isn't standardised by the XSL 1.0 Recommendation.  It was one of
the first things that came up for discussion when the EXSL-FO list
started up, but the discussion died after Ken Holman said that he knew
of a formatter that didn't produce an area tree.

Serialising either tree as XML would just require a simple variation
on the 'xmlroff -d2' or 'xmlroff -d4' output, which uses
fo_object_debug_dump().

 > graphical view can be an entirely separate app.  Might well make debugging 
 > easier.

Half the point of the browser idea is to prototype the loadable module
approach.  Writing it out as XML and using a separate app doesn't help
that part of the scenario.

Note also that the proposal is to be able to show both FO tree and
area tree views at once.

 > Even without doing this, the browser should be a fairly simple job using 
 > GnomeCanvas.

I had thought that a tree required GtkTree or similar, not a canvas
widget.  What am I missing?

 >               Unfortunately I have a million-and-one other things to do at 
 > the moment... :-(

Don't we all, and many of mine already have to do with xmlroff.

 > <blue-sky-musing>
 > I'm hoping to add custom previews to my app Conglomerate 
 > (www.conglomerate.org) that automatically update as you edit the XML DocBook 
 > source;  one possibility would be a FO area tree view showing the "live" 
 > results of XSL transformations...
 > </blue-sky-musing>

My blue-sky musing frequently concerns incremental updates: pushing a
small change, e.g. one changed word, in the source XML through the
XSLT transformation and through the XSL formatter without either
transforming the whole document again or reformatting the whole
document again.

Also, speaking as list administrator now, please only quote the parts
of the previous message to which you are directly replying or only
quote enough to establish the context.  Including entire copies of
previous messages reduces the signal-to-noise ratio in SourceForge's
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Regards,


Tony Graham
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