On Tue, May 02, 2006 at 12:31:56AM -0400, Fred Drake wrote:
> On 5/1/06, Keith Davies <keith.davies@...> wrote:
> > I took a run at this a year or two ago. My first step was to go through
> > the entire RSRD in Word, applying styles consistently (and adding styles
> > to mark 'monster', 'feat', etc. beginnings).
>
> This is very much something I'd like to avoid doing in a word
> processor of any sort. I can get by doing very basic in MS Word and
> OpenOffice (including semantic marking like this), but I find it so
> much easier in a real text editor.

I agree entirely. This step took a number of hours -- I could have done
it in a single day if I'd had everything set up ahead of time.

I wasn't trying to format the things for presentation, at all. I just
declared some paragraph styles ('Monster', 'Feat', etc.) then tromped
through the files and applied them to the first line. I was just
marking where each element started.

After that, I had XSLT parse things apart. I could've done much the
same thing with text -- prepended 'FEATSTART:' to the front of each
line, say -- but this was quicker, less prone to error, and much easier
to parse apart with XSLT.

And yes, it was mindnumbing and sucked. Thanks for asking.

> I spent a little time this evening thinking about a LaTeX-based markup
> language for this stuff, but there are so many bits and pieces that
> beg for markup. Making use of some of this stuff from LaTeX is likely
> beyond my level of TeX-fu. I wonder if using XML does make sense for
> this, and then use XSLT to generate LaTeX for typesetting.

This is what I was doing, yes. While *TeX is nice for formatting, I
find it's not really good as the base for transformations.

> Whatever the metalanguage, things like this always seem to demand new
> markup languages on top of the base, and that always ends up being A
> Project.
>
> Has anyone experimented with a specialized XML language for the SRD?

That *is* what this mailing list is about, is it not? I think a bunch
of us have. We might even settle on a standard, too, if we all had the
same uses for the data.


Keith
--
Keith Davies "Always code as if the guy who ends up
keith.davies@... maintaining your code is a psychopath
keith.davies@... who knows where you live."
http://www.kjdavies.org/ -- Damian Conway