Re: [help-texinfo] Re: texinfo.xsl not working

[Le grand pinguin]

On Wed, Jun 01, 2005 at 05:41:37PM -0400, Karl Berry wrote:
>     I usually prefer "chunked" output so
>     larger manuals don't kill my browser.
> 
> 1) Texinfo manuals are usually pretty small, as such things go.

Well, i'd call neither the Gnu Common Lisp manual nor the SBCL manual "small",
at least to big to be read comfortably as one webpage.

> 2) If there is a sensible way to split XML output, I'd be most happy to
> incorporate a patch for that :).  I don't know how to do it.

There are two possibilities: either output xml files per chapter/section etc.
and create a master document that uses xml:includes or create one large xml
and let the stylesheet do the chunking (the later seems to be easier since it
only requires small changes in the stylesheet).

> 
>     I really don't think there's a place for all theses special entities
>     that duplicate characters easily available in ISO-8859-1 and
>     Unicode.
> 
> As I recall, it simplifies the makeinfo code to output the entity names.

As opposed to writing 8-bit chars? 

> It also seems better to me than outputting actual 8-bit characters.

What's so bad about emitting 8bit chars? First: xml requires utf-8 and
IOS-8859-1 support, so any xml-processing compliant software must be able
to handle 8bit anyway. As a matter of fact, the xml that makeinfo emits right
now claims to be UTF-8 (hmmmmm). The problem i see with the current apporoach:
any xml processor now depends on the DTD. So you put a lot of requirements on 
the
processing application (it can't use a simple parser but needs to use a 
validating
parser, and worse, one that can parse old-style DTD (those are getting 
unfashionable
these days).

> 
>     What i really need to find out is whether the XML output looses
>     information that's present in the original texinfo file.
> 
> The design is that it does not lose information.  However, in practice,
> some bits are lost.  Anything in the @titlepage environment, for one;
> that is hard to fix and won't be any time soon, unless someone sends me
> a patch :).  Other than that, bug reports are welcome.

Thanks for pointing this out: i'll have a lok at the makeinfo code as soon
as i find some time - i'll send some stylesheet patches first.

 Thanks 

  RalfD

> 
> Thanks,
> k