[osis-core] <emph> and formatting in OSIS

Harry Plantinga osis-core@bibletechnologieswg.org
Wed, 26 Jun 2002 11:19:46 -0400


Chris,

I think I understand your concern about formatting, rend,
emph, etc.  Correct me if I'm wrong.  Maybe you're thinking it's
going to be very hard to USE osis in your software and 
get attractive results without formatting in the document.
Maybe you're thinking that parsing a stylesheet, handling XSLT,
etc. would be a Big Pain to have to do in your software.
(I may be way off in left field; if so, please forgive and/or
ignore me.)

Let me suggest a couple of approaches for handling all of
this stuff easily.

a) if OSIS is your internal format, use a rendering class that
can handle CSS and XSLT. Then you "automatically" get support
for the kind of styling OSIS is using, even without standard
type names like "x-ital". Of course, on-the-fly XSLT 
conversions can be a bit slow -- very slow for huge documents.

b) use some other rendering class internally, e.g. an HTML
or RTF renderer. When importing or reading an OSIS document,
convert to your internal format. One good way to do such a 
conversion would be an XSLT transformation, perhaps with the 
libxslt package which is widely and freely available on unix 
platforms.

I don't know if this is helpful.  What I'm trying to say is 
that there are good rendering libraries for XML and/or good
transformation libraries for transforming from OSIS to your
own internal format.

-Harry