[XML-SIG] tools

[Martin v. Loewis]

> I am looking for some (stable) tools in Python to transform XML to
> RTF,PDF or MIF Files. Which tools would you suggest and what are
> your experiences?

This is not a very specific request - there are many ways to transform
XML into, say, RTF.

Typically, you can only develop such tools if 
a) you know what the document type is, and
b) you know how exactly you want to output to look like

The general approach here is to define "style sheets" which perform
such transformations. Even though it is possible to generate arbitrary
text with the XML Style Sheet Language (XSL), it is a time-consuming
task to produce such tools; and you have to produce them anew for
every document type.

I'd also recommend to look into Jade. Unless you are bound to a
specific DTD, I also recommend to use the DocBook DTD. For DocBook,
there is already a complete set of tools generating RTF, PDF, and MIF.

In terms of RPM packages, I've installed jade-1.2.1-9, docbook-3.1-4,
sgml-common-0.1-8 and stylesheets-1.54.13rh-1.

It would be certainly possible to implement, say, RTF generation
yourself using just PyXML - you'd have to know a lot about RTF,
though.

Regards,
Martin