On Fri, 22 Apr 2005, puregin wrote:
On 20 Apr 2005, at 8:47 PM, Matt Schwartz wrote:
Djun,
My goal is to eventually have drupal books exportable in a variety of formats, including LaTeX. I haven't had time to look into the LaTeX exporting yet. Since I want to literally output a book from generic drupal nodes I'm not sure how we'd handle mathematics. I don't want to have to rely on a special input format (i.e. drupal filter).
If I understand you, your intention to store source as HTML, and convert to your export formats on the fly. Is this correct?
I don't know what kind of applications you actually have in mind. In my experience, though, if you want to produce a high quality printed book that works as a book, you need to start with markup that supports print intentions.
Right, everything else is pretty useless. html is not for typesetting (if you take typesetting a little bit more serious than just getting letters on paper).
This isn't a problem if you intend to take an existing Drupal book, export it, and edit it heavily in the exported format. Probably life will be easier for the editor with this task if certain conventions can be enforced on the source text, either explicitly by the book module or implicitly through the cooperation of your contributors.
One could try to develop some smart filters, but you will never be able to avoid handiwork.
So unfortunately I don't currently have any code that can help you.
I'm interested in a slightly different problem, namely having nodes contain LaTeX (to start with, perhaps later also MathML and other sources.)
That should be much easier. You could develop a filter that calls detex or something similar (latex2html?) on the node content. Math formulae would be converted to images with latex2html or what its name was.
There's a certain amount of interest in using DocBook XML as a native format for Drupal Documentation, so perhaps there will be some overlap with this project, if it gets off of the ground.
I doubt that. There has been talk about that for at least two years. Cheers, Gerhard