Custom Document Formatting

[rickholt]

Many years ago at IBM we had a text formatting language (DCF) which let
you specify all sorts of microcommands to a page formatter. Not
particularly exciting, but it was also a primitive programming language
and you could write your own GML tags (commands). In fact, you could
create a form or specification or any standard format by defining a set
of custom GML macros. The GML would specify content and the macros
would define the implementation.

Now GML hath begot SGML which begot XML and the same claims (or
promises) of custom tags is made for XML. But not being an XML wizard,
I wonder just how true that is. Is there a formatting language such
that I can do something like:

<XML document> --> <formatting language> --> <Microsoft Word> -->
<printed document>

(Feel free to substitute your favorite word processing program for
Micro$oft Word, but it needs to run on Windoze to be useful to me.)

Rick.

[Joseph Kesselman]

ri******@gmail.com wrote:

Is there a formatting language such that I can do something like:

<XML document> --> <formatting language> --> <Microsoft Word> -->
<printed document>

The W3C's official path is: XML document -> XSLT stylesheet (formatting
language) -> XSL-FO document (page markup language) -> FO renderer
(Apache FOP or similar) -> printed document.

Other paths exist, including some that use LaTeX as an intermediate
representation and others that go through HTML and rely on a browser to
do the rendering. The nice thing about abstract markup is precisely that
you can process it in different ways depending on your needs.

--
Joe Kesselman / Beware the fury of a patient man. -- John Dryden

[Andy Dingley]

Joseph Kesselman wrote:

The W3C's official path is: XML document -> XSLT stylesheet (formatting
language) -> XSL-FO document (page markup language) -> FO renderer
(Apache FOP or similar) -> printed document.

With the addendum that repeated XSLT transformations (with different
stylesheets) are anticipated for many of the more complex examples of
this.

"Cocoon" is a good search term, as well as "Apache fop"