Title XPP Style Enhancer
Author Anthony Wilmot
Abstract Program to manipulate and display resulting XML style files from the XyEnterprise Professional Publisher (XPP) system.
What At work, we have Item Format (style) specifications, which are used by our publishing system to control the typographical and page layout aspects of XML elements in our publishing system.

We have an XML representation of these styles, which currently have a lot of duplicated information, making it difficult for our users to understand and manage their style files.

I would like to write a program which transforms the current XML style representation into an alternative form, one which can be more efficient and useful.

This program should consist of several modules which can be run in sequence on a command line, or alternatively within a browser, probably under Tomcat, using Servlets.

This will enable the programs to be executed either as batch programs, or interactively by a user. In the interactive form, the user will see a visual representation of the style specification before and after each transformation. There should be hypertext links where appropriate, to show the use of shared information.

The XML transformation will be done using XSLT, and the interactive version will use Java, Servlets under Tomcat, and XSLT.
Why Because this program would save our customers a lot of manual work, comparing style files and reworking them to share common style values.
How I propose to develop a Java and/or XSLT program suite which would do the following:
  • Translate (XSLT) a style file from the current XML format to a more efficient format, to be defined. For example, use the concept of shared attribute sets of composition/pagination values to avoid duplicating style values.
  • Display the resulting style information, both before and after optimization, using XSLT, and possibly CSS.
  • Take the style file in the (new) format, optimize it by comparing composition values and creating shared attribute sets.
  • Create an html rendering of the new output file, using XSLT, and possibly CSS.
Questions