From: Pierre-Charles David <Pierre-Charles.David@...>
Date: 2001-10-19T22:31:41+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:22742] [ANN] texml.rb 0.3

Available at: http://purl.org/net/home/pcdavid#texml.rb
 From the webpage:

texml.rb: a small rewrite of Douglas Lovell's TeXML tool (originally in 
Java) in the Ruby language. It might not support all the features of the 
original, and probably has bugs, but it works well enough for my needs 
and may be useful to others. It's released under the GPL license, and 
requires the xmlparser extension for Ruby, to be found on RAA.

TeXML consists in two things:

     * An XML dialect modeled after the structure of (La)TeX documents. 
This dialect replaces (La)TeX commands with corresponding XML elements. 
For example, the (La)TeX source fragment \texttt{some text} can be 
represented in TeXML as <cmd name="texttt">some text</cmd>. The DTD for 
this dialect and its usage is presented in detail in Mr. Lovell's 
article TeXML: Typesetting XML with TeX, Douglas Lovell, IBM Research, 
in TUGboat 20.3, Proceedings of the 1999 Annual Meeting, available in 
PDF here.
     * A small utility to convert an XML document conforming to this DTD 
into a syntaxically correct (La)TeX source file, ready to be typeset. 
The orginal tool is writtent in Java by M. Lovell; what I provide here 
is a re-implementation of this tool (based on the information in the 
article) in the Ruby programming language.

TeXML allows you to leverage the power and robustness of TeX's 
typesetting engine to present your XML documents. Typical usage is:

    1. Convert your XML document into TeXML using an XSLT stylesheet.
    2. Use texml.rb to convert the resulting file into (La)TeX.
    3. Use (La)TeX to typeset the file.

% xslt docbook2texml.xsl report.xml | texml.rb > report.tex
% latex report.tex

In the long term, XSL:FO (XSL Formatting Objects) should provide the 
same kind of functionnalities (quality typesetting of XML documents), 
but current implementations are not as mature (by far) as the TeX 
engine. Also, XSL:FO is very low level (comparable to bare TeX), whereas 
TeXML allows you to write LaTeX files, which have a higher level of 
abstraction, and for which lots of useful extension packages exist.

In theory, you could write your XSLT stylesheet to output directly 
(La)TeX source, but I find it more convenient to ouput XML. This allows 
you to do some post-processing on the files more easily, and with this 
tool, the conversion is painless.

-- 
Pierre-Charles David (pcdavid <at> emn <dot> fr)
Computer Science PhD Student, �cole des Mines de Nantes, France
Homepage: http://purl.org/net/home/pcdavid