• From: Philippe Poulard <philippe.poulard@s...>
• To: "David A. Lee" <dlee@c...>
• Date: Mon, 16 Nov 2009 16:31:45 +0100

Hi,

Have a look at this book:
http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596009748

I have read a long time ago the first edition that was covering that 
topic very well; I don't know about the second edition, but the chapter 
7 since to cover almost what you need; you might find snippet codes 
somewhere at oreilly.com

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,
> 
> 
> 
> 


-- 
Cordialement,

               ///
              (. .)
  --------ooO--(_)--Ooo--------
|      Philippe Poulard       |
  -----------------------------
  http://reflex.gforge.inria.fr/
        Have the RefleX !

• References:
  • Formatting XML as ascii Text
    • From: "David A. Lee" <dlee@c...>