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

[R. Mattes]

On Wed, 01 Jun 2005 01:14:44 +0300, Alper Ersoy wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> R. Mattes:
>> the XSLT stylesheet distributed with texinfo (CVS) doesn't work
> 
> I was expecting this a bit earlier, for it's been a while since the
> XML output changed considerably. :) 

Ah, i see, a trap :-)

> I believe the sole purpose that
> that stylesheet serves is being just an example of how one can write
> a bare-bones XSLT stylesheet (though not specifically for Texinfo XML.)
> 
>> I've corrected the up-casing of the template patterns but i think
>> there's room for much improvement.
> 
> Please submit a patch along with a short changelog entry,
> I strongly believe it will be included in the next Texinfo release.

Yes, i'll do as sson as i find some time to run a few test cases on larger
texinfo files (GCL and SBCL).

> What else do you think can be improved?

Well, as i said: footnote handling would be a good first candidate.
Indexing and crossreferences as well. I usually prefer "chunked" output so
larger manuals don't kill my browser. I'm not too happy with the xml
current output: i'd expect an encoding attribute in the xml declaration
(or, even better, a commandline switch to configure the encoding
attribute). 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. 

>> On a related topic: i'd like to test my stylesheets dor completeness -
>> is there any texinfo testcase/test document that shows all possible
>> markup?
> 
> Maybe not all markup, but testing your stylesheet against documentation
> such as Texinfo's, Emacs', GCC's, etc. will help you see how it
> interacts with almost everything used in real documents.

I think's it's pretty hard to track down all the small differences. What i
really need to find out is whether the XML output looses information
that's present in the original texinfo file.

 Thanks, RalfD