Useful Stuff for other Authors

Universal Modular XSLT Formatter

I'm developing XSLT 1.0 stylesheets which transform an XML file (potentially in any XML format) to a book/article in a variety of file formats.

Now the stylesheets are not yet published as I'm debugging and perfecting them, but I'm going to publish them under open source GPL-2 license (to be freely available for anybody). Please donate to help and incentive the development.

For examples of results generated by the stylesheets see my Christian spiritual books on this site (I can send you PDF files for testing if you'll ask).

The stylesheets are designed to be (probably) the most modular and extensible stylesheets ever created! In fact I'm developing a standard for XSLT transformations of any rich text formats. The frontends (writers of different rich text formats such as HTML and PostScript) and backends (scanners of different XML formats such as OSIS, DocBook, TEI) are separate and can be easily combined:


	
	  <?xml version="1.0"?>

	  <!DOCTYPE xsl:stylesheet>

	
	<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"

	                xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"

	                xmlns:osis="http://www.bibletechnologies.net/2003/OSIS/namespace"

	                exclude-result-prefixes="osis">

	  <xsl:import href="xhtml11.xsl"/>

	  <xsl:import href="osis-formatter.xsl"/>

	</xsl:stylesheet>

This stylesheet uses OSIS backend and XHTML frontend to make HTML out of OSIS (the XML format for Bible related texts).

Currently I have the following frontends: HTML (namely XHTML 1.1), Lout (can be transformed to PostScript and PDF); and the following backends: OSIS (an XML format for encoding Bible related materials, I support only commentaries/devotionals not formatting of Bibles). Other backends (e.g. for DocBook and TEI text formats) can be added as the stylesheets are designed to be very extensible. So these stylesheets can become the base for the document formatting system for many different kinds of XML documents.

During development of the Universal Modular Formatter, I've learned many important things about effective usage of XSLT (especially version 1.0). If I will find enough free time, I'm going to share my experience with other XSLT developers, writing a book about how I designed these stylesheets.