LCDtools - XML to numerous formats

Downloads

• LCDtools 1.2
• pilotpdb library 1.0 (needed for LCDtools)

Both LCDtools and pilotpdb library run autoconf, and require Free Recode and Expat to work properly. (RedHat and Debian have packages for these, the Expat packages are named libxmltok and libxmltok-dev in Debian.)

Introduction

LCD stands for Least Common Denominator. The idea behind these tools is simple. Create a minimal markup dtd for XML, then parse this minimal markup into a plaethora of formats. I am most certainly aware of extremely sexy projects like Cocoon from Apache Software Foundation, but I wanted it now (and that was the summer 2000), and I wanted to support a maximum of existing formats.

If you already have your documents in XML, why not use XSL-T and transform them into lcdarticle or lcdbook format, and LCDtools will be able to convert them to all these formats:

• HTML, WML, XHTML...
• RTF Rich Text Format
• LaTeX (from this you can get postscript, PDF etc)
• Plaintext ISO8859-1
• Palm Pilot Doc- and Rich Reader format

Reference

have a look at some references:

• lcdarticle.dtd
• lcdbook.dtd (experimental)
• morality.xml (an example markup of an article)
• Morality - here you can see how the LCDtools deliver dynamic content from a common XML file on a web site. Try the "variants" to the left in the menu.

Written by Linus Walleij, /<-r4d s0pHtw4r3.