Re: [xml-dev] Formatting XML as ascii Text

["David A. Lee" <dlee@calldei.com>]

The "Ideal" solution would be to take advantage of the font 
charactoristics of the device, plug that into the processr and have it used
to word wrap at a pixel width.  (for reference I'm refering to 'legacy' 
Palm, PPC and blackberry devices using the system font).
But if thats too hard, even coming close with a charactor-count width 
would work but wouldnt produce as good results.
In particular I'm not sure how to do the tables at all with 
character-count instead of using the font metrics.
In another part of the product we solve this part by forcing tables into 
a fixed width font.  I'm not sure that the piece of code I need to shove 
this data supports fixed width intermixed with variable width.




David A. Lee
dlee@calldei.com  
http://www.calldei.com
http://www.xmlsh.org
812-482-5224



Mike Sokolov wrote:
> That's an interesting problem: I'm confused about the wrapping 
> requirement though.  Do you need to wrap at a given number of 
> characters (sounded like 40?) or a pixel (or inch) width?  Your 
> comment about the variable-width font makes it sound like you are 
> printing or displaying on screen with a particular font.  It's 
> obviously much simpler if you don't have to worry about fonts, 
> variable character widths, vagaries of printer drivers and the like.
>
> -Mike
>
> David A. Lee wrote:
>> I have a project where I need to take XML and format it as ascii text.
>> Sounds simple right ? But alas the requirements are subtle.  It seems 
>> people dont do text formatting much anymore.
>> I fondly remember the days of nroff where I could do good text 
>> formatting and achieve things like word splitting (hyphenating),
>> justification etc on text content.  In particular a challenge is to 
>> support multi column tables.  Thats right, text spanning 5 columns,
>> that needs to wrap in each column.   Oh and do that with 40 column 
>> line widths. Piece of cake.
>> Oh and its a Variable width text font ... ha !
>>
>> What I tried so far which almost works sorta, just enough to not work 
>> well enough :)
>> Translate the XML to HTML with XSLT then I downloaded one of the free 
>> "HTML to Text" tools which are prevalent on the net.
>> It sorta did work, except for the tables.   But I need something that 
>> can work in a production environment.   Open Source is prefered,
>> but if it does an excellent job then a commercial product could be 
>> justified (pun intended).
>>
>> My next attempt will to try Apache FOP.    I looked at RenderX but 
>> they dont claim text output.
>> Apache FOP claims a text output but with caveots, the claim is its 
>> not robust code with poor results.
>> Maybe they are being kind and it really works great.   I will try.
>>
>> Any other suggestions ?   I can always 'roll my own' but this project 
>> is not on the budget yet and were trying to see if we can do 
>> something with minimal work.
>> Appreciated,
>>
>> thanks,
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
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