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[apologies for responding to an old message] Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com> writes: > / Taro Ikai <tikai@ABINITIO.COM> was heard to say: > | I am having a few problems prettyprinting my Docbook documents. I am using > | Cygwin distribution of Tidy. > > Beyond the fact that tidy is not designed to pretty print anything but HTML, With respect, I think that ain't necessarily so :) Tidy has an -xml option for enabling you to tell it that you're working with an XML file (i.e., a non-XHTML file authored against some arbitrary DTD) instead of an HTML file. Beyond that, it even provides some customization capability for allowing you to specify elements whose contents you don't want wrapped/indented/ pretty-printed (i.e., 'line specific' environments in DocBook lingo.) I've made some limited use of Tidy myself in makefiles -- for the purpose of pretty-printing some converted DocBook XML content -- and found it works pretty well for the particular case in which I'm using it. I could also see Tidy being useful as a means for "normalizing" XML before checkins to a source-control system. What I mean is, many people work in environments where authors use different editing applications to edit their XML content. Some of those editors (e.g., Emacs/nxml or psgml) preserve the whitespace and line breaks unless told to do otherwise, while others (e.g., Arbortext Epic) cavalierly munge the original whitespace and formatting. So, given that you've got no assurance that authors won't be using editors that step all over the original white space/line breaks in your XML source, in order to be able to get useful diffs out of your source- control system, you need some way of 'normalizing' your source each time you check in (or, you need some othe way of generating diffs that doesn't rely on you source-control system's built-in diff capability, but that's a whole 'nother issue...) I think 'tidy -xml' can be useful with XML content in such cases. That said, its handling of arbitrary XML files does have limitations -- notably, handling of general entities and stuff that Taro has mentioned in previous messages. > it is very, very hard to pretty print DocBook. Be that as it may, I think Tidy, more than any other XML pretty-printing solution, probably provides you with a way for controlling what should be pretty-printed/indented and what shouldn't be. If there were a way to work around the problems with arbitrary general entities and with some of the other problems that Taro has mentioned, I think Tidy would be an ideal solution. --Mike
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