Re: DOCBOOK-APPS: About DB2LaTeX

[Jirka Kosek <jirka at kosek dot cz>]

Ramon Casellas wrote:

> Many of the comments and bug reports I receive about DB2LaTeX concern
> the escaping of characters as well as internationalization. I'm thinking
> about how I could improve the package, and using external "modules" with
> java and/or C++ is an option. However, dropping the "XSL only" approach
> may mean compatibility problems, and that some XSL processors are
> supported and others aren't.
> 
> So my questions are:
> 
> - Should I add extension modules in order to make DB2LaTeX to make it
> perform better and faster?

I think that speed is not an big issue and using external modules
wouldn't increase speed significantly. All problems of current DB2LaTeX
could be solved in pure portable XSLT.

> In general terms, I would be against the inclusion of external modules.
> However, some things require ugly hacks and some people have suggested
> using add-ons for these.

There are my suggestions to most common problems:

Escaping of characters -- this can be done by table (stored as XML
fragment directly in stylesheet) with replacement rules. This will be
easier to customize and there won't be need for very "deep" and
recursive scape template.

Internationalizations issues -- for different languages Latex needs
quite different preambles. This preamble (or it's parts) can be stored
as localization text and be independant for each language.

						Jirka

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  Jirka Kosek  	                     
  e-mail: jirka@kosek.cz
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