-$Cambridge: exim/doc/doc-docbook/HowItWorks.txt,v 1.6 2007/04/11 15:26:09 ph10 Exp $
+$Cambridge: exim/doc/doc-docbook/HowItWorks.txt,v 1.7 2007/08/29 13:37:28 ph10 Exp $
CREATING THE EXIM DOCUMENTATION
. w3m 0.5.1
- This is a text-oriented web brower. It is used to produce the Ascii form of
+ This is a text-oriented web brower. It is used to produce the ASCII form of
the Exim documentation (spec.txt) from a specially-created HTML format. It
seems to do a better job than lynx.
Processing a .xml file into the five different output formats is not entirely
straightforward. For a start, the same XML is not suitable for all the
different output styles. When the final output is in a text format (.txt,
-.texinfo) for instance, all non-Ascii characters in the input must be converted
-to Ascii transliterations because the current processing tools do not do this
+.texinfo) for instance, all non-ASCII characters in the input must be converted
+to ASCII transliterations because the current processing tools do not do this
correctly automatically.
In order to cope with these issues in a flexible way, a Perl script called
-ascii
- This option is used for Ascii output formats. It makes the following
+ This option is used for ASCII output formats. It makes the following
character replacements:
’ => ' apostrophe
– => - en dash
The apostrophe is specified numerically because that is what xfpt generates
- from an Ascii single quote character. Non-Ascii characters that are not in
+ from an ASCII single quote character. Non-ASCII characters that are not in
this list should not be used without thinking about how they might be
- converted for the Ascii formats.
+ converted for the ASCII formats.
In addition to the character replacements, this option causes quotes to be
put round <literal> text items, and <quote> and </quote> to be replaced by
- Ascii quote marks. You would think the stylesheet would cope with the latter,
- but it seems to generate non-Ascii characters that w3m then turns into
+ ASCII quote marks. You would think the stylesheet would cope with the latter,
+ but it seems to generate non-ASCII characters that w3m then turns into
question marks.
-bookinfo
CREATING TEXT FILES
This happens in four stages. The Pre-xml script is called with the -ascii,
--optbreak, and -noindex options to convert the input to Ascii characters,
+-optbreak, and -noindex options to convert the input to ASCII characters,
insert line break points, and disable the production of an index. Then the
xmlto command converts the XML to a single HTML document, using these
stylesheets:
because the stylesheet itself generates a copyright symbol as part of the
document title; the character is not in the original input.
-The w3m command is used with the -dump option to turn the HTML file into Ascii
+The w3m command is used with the -dump option to turn the HTML file into ASCII
text, but this contains multiple sequences of blank lines that make it look
awkward. Furthermore, chapter and section titles do not stand out very well. A
local Perl script called Tidytxt is used to post-process the output. First, it
newline is inserted before each section heading, and they are underlined with
hyphens.
+August 2007: A further feature has been added to Tidytxt. The current version
+of xmlto makes HTML that contains non-ASCII Unicode characters. Fortunately,
+they are few. The heading uses "box drawing" characters in the range U+2500 to
+U+253F, and within the main text, U+00A0 (hard space) occasionally appears. The
+Tidytxt script now turns all the former into hyphens and the latter into normal
+spaces. Bullets, which are set as U+25CF, are turned into asterisks. (It might
+be possible to do all this in the same way as I dealt with copyright - see
+above - but adding three lines of Perl to an existing script was a lot easier.)
+
CREATING INFO FILES
Philip Hazel
-Last updated: 27 March 2007
+Last updated: 23 August 2007
git://git.exim.org / exim.git / blobdiff