[Doc-SIG] Producing output

[Moore, Paul]

From: David Goodger [mailto:goodger@users.sourceforge.net]
> Tony J Ibbs (Tibs) wrote:
> > I'm not up-to-date enough with the TeX world to know if there are
> > XML to TeX translators. Does ReportLabs PDF engine take XML as
> > input?
> 
> Of course, such a translator would need style sheets in order to
> understand the DPS XML output. (Forgive me if this is obvious; I
> think it isn't obvious to many people). XML is not a single data
> structure, it is a syntax for describing data structures. XML is
> like the Latin alphabet; necessary to understand written English,
> French, Spanish, Python, etc., but not sufficient.

Um. It wasn't obvious to me. And it still isn't. What are we talking about
here? I know very little about XML, and I didn't see XML as of particular
relevance for writing an output formatter. I'm expecting to just be
tree-walking a data structure (which may be a DOM, but who cares?). Style
sheets, namespaces and the like don't fit into my picture at all.

Have I missed something fundamental?

(*Must* get round to reading the code!)

Paul.