Re: [xml-dev] Formatting using DTD

["G. Ken Holman" <gkholman@CraneSoftwrights.com>]

At 2009-03-04 00:14 +0000, Graeme Kidd wrote:
>Its my first time posting here so I hope I am in the correct mailing list.

Welcome!

>I am using a XML program

Do you mean a generic XML editor, or some custom GUI that is 
capturing your input into a particular vocabulary?

>that has two views; one user friendly wysiwyg view and a plain text 
>view of the underlining XML. When editing XML files in the wysiwyg 
>view the backend XML gets really messy as no formatting is applied 
>which causes lines to become long and unreadable.

By formatting, do you mean indentation?

Indentation is appropriate when you have element content, but it can 
be a problem when you have mixed content (sibling elements and text).

>I have been told that pretty printing can be configured on a DTD basis

If I understand what you are asking for, this isn't true ... such 
indentation would be a feature of the editing tool, not a property of 
the document model.

>but I am not sure what that means and a quick search brings up 
>things about XSLT.

Yes, a simple identity transform with <xsl:output indent="yes"/> does 
an effect job of indentation on the output.  I especially like the 
indentation choices made by Saxon.

>Does anyone know how certain formatting can be forced onto an XML 
>file via a DTD file?

I'm quite sure this is not possible.  If you can cite where you read 
about the configuration, perhaps someone on the list will recognize 
what you see.  Perhaps your program is looking for reserved 
attributes in the document model.

I hope this helps.

. . . . . . . . . . . Ken

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