From: Dave Thomas <dave@...>
Date: 2004-03-06T01:55:25+09:00
Subject: Re: pickaxe with pics?


On Mar 5, 2004, at 9:02, Jim Freeze wrote:

>> Books written for the Pragmatic Bookshelf now are written in XML, with
>> code inclusion. The XML is converted to PDFs using XSLT to generate
>> TeX, and then a set of macros in TeX to generate Postscript/PDF. We
>> still haven't found anything that generates nicer typeset output.
>>
>> The same XMLs can be transformed (again,  using XSLT) to HTML.
>
>
> Excuse my ignorance, but is the XML transformation to <whatever> via
> XLST done with Ruby code? If so, is this something that ships
> with Ruby or can be downloaded?
>

Jim:

It's just standard XSLT: we're using xsltproc to do it at the moment, 
but any XSLT process would do.

> Also, do you have a small snippet of XML, XLST and code to show
> the process in action?

It's hard to show too much, but here's some markup from the version 
control book.

  - - - - - -
     <p>
       The second form of conflict resolution is often
       called <firstuse>optimistic locking</firstuse>,  although it
       really is no locking at all.<indexterm>
	<i1>Locking</i1>
	<i2>optimistic</i2>
       </indexterm><indexterm>
	<i1>Optimistic locking</i1>
       </indexterm><indexterm>
	<i1>Merge</i1>
	<i2>automatic on update</i2>
       </indexterm>
       Here, every developer gets to edit any
       checked out file: the files are checked out in a read/write
       state. However, the repository will not allow you to check in a 
file
       that has been updated in the repository since you last checked it 
out.
       Instead, it asks you to update your local copy of the file to 
include
       the latest repository changes before checking in. This is where 
the
       cleverness lies. Instead of simply overwriting all your hard work 
with
       the latest repository version of the file, the version control 
system
       attempts to merge the repository changes with your changes. For
       example, let's look at <filename>File1.java</filename>:
     </p>

     <programlisting language="java" number="yes">
      public class File1 {
        public String getName() {
          return "Wibble";
        }
        public int getSize() {
          return 42;
        }
     }
     </programlisting>

     <p>
       Wilma and Fred both check this file out. Fred changes line 3:
     </p>

  - - - -

This isn't strict XML: these files get fed through a preprocessor which 
handles all the code markup and so on. It also gives us cross reference 
and callout facilities into the code.

The XSLT is pretty straightforward, and generates LaTeX (for PDF 
generation).


Cheers

Dave