Re: A plug for XXE (Re: Alternative formats for IDs)

[Elwyn Davies <elwynd at dial.pipex.com>]

Joe Touch wrote:

> Elwyn Davies wrote:
>  
>
> > I used to use the Word template but the freedom from hassle of
> > generating the final documents
> >    
>
> I'm not sure what freedom this means; XML still needs to run through a
> script, just as Word does.
>  
you can't do it from inside Word and in my experience the Word process 
broke about 80% of the time (mostly due to the generic text printer 
being horribly buggy) but maybe it is better now since I gave up with 
Word some time ago. [Microsoft were never interested in fixing these 
bugs - reducing some lines to heights of a fraction of a point and 
rendering one character per line in an apparently random fashion - and 
they persisted across multiple releases of Word.]

>  
>
> > the ease of generating references
> >    
>
> Commercial software allows BIBTEX references to be imported into
> citation databases, so this is moot as well.
>
>  
I am sure I could buy some tools but how well integrated with Word would 
this be and how much would it cost me?

> > makes
> > xxe/xml2rfc
> > and support of complex numbered lists (almost impossible to achieve in
> > Word)
> >    
>
> I checked your three current I-Ds and five RFCs, and the most complex
> numbering I saw was "G1, G2, ...", "P1, P2...", and paragraphs numbered
> "G.1:, G.2:...". Word has been able to handle all of these since the
> late 1980's. Was there a more complex example I missed, or one in a
> pending document that hasn't been issued that you could give as an example?
>  

In theory.. my experience was that multiple sets of numbered paragraphs 
spread across sections was painful and error prone.

But ultimately it was just the level of repeated niggles and panics when 
conversion fails close to the I-D deadline that I don't get with xml2rfc 
and especially with xxe.

Don't let me stop you using Word but I know which set of tools I prefer.

Elwyn

> Joe
>
>  

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