xml-dev - Re: control characters

[Matt Sergeant <matt@sergeant.org>]

On Sun, 18 Jun 2000, Simon St.Laurent wrote:

> At 12:55 PM 6/18/00 -0400, Clark C. Evans wrote:
> >That being said, XT provides an output method and 
> >special tags which can be used to output "raw" text.
> >This, IMHO, is the appropriate place for such a
> >thing... XSLT is big enough.
> 
> It was a long time ago, in idle conference chatter, but someone was talking
> about building a simple generic XML->text file converter, that would
> support block, inline, list, and table displays, as well as let you convert
> elements or entitities to whatever formatting characters you needed.
> 
> I've pondered this a lot in a CSS context, but I don't think this had
> anything to do with CSS or XSLT - and it was supposed to be a lot simpler
> than XSLT.  It wasn't a scripting environment, either.
> 
> Does anyone else remember such a thing?

Not personally, but AxKit's XPathScript is certainly up to the job. You
can use sprintf and various other perl formatting techniques to achieve
precisely the layout you're after. I use this to create my invoices (my
boss hates any rich text format - text is easiest for him to access) which
I lay out in a table format.

Sample output:

   Hours Worked:           80     @ $00.00                   $0000.00

   Total:                                                    $0000.00

(obviously with a whole lot more information besides that, and real
values)

The template to create the invoice (including all summations and output
lines) is 56 lines long, of which 22 lines are just static text. You are
totally free to use ^L's or ^Z's or whatever you like in your output.

-- 
<Matt/>

Fastnet Software Ltd. High Performance Web Specialists
Providing mod_perl, XML, Sybase and Oracle solutions
Email for training and consultancy availability.
http://sergeant.org | AxKit: http://axkit.org


***************************************************************************
This is xml-dev, the mailing list for XML developers.
To unsubscribe, mailto:majordomo@xml.org&BODY=unsubscribe%20xml-dev
List archives are available at http://xml.org/archives/xml-dev/
***************************************************************************