Re: TEI/TEI lite support

On Sat, 2004-01-31 at 17:09, Roberto Rosselli Del Turco wrote:
> First of all, I'm delighted to see a fellow TEI encoder on this list. I
> will try to comment on Dave's suggestions.
> 
> Il sab, 2004-01-31 alle 15:09, Dave Malcolm ha scritto:
> > You may be able to add the support yourself!
> 
> Unfortunately it's not so simple for full TEI stuff.
> 
> > If you have a DTD file to hand, then run Conglomerate, and select
> > File->Import, then browse to the DTD file.  You should get a "File
> > Import Options" dialog.  Make sure "Convert DTD into a Conglomerate
> > Display Specification" is selected and press OK.
> 
> Problem is, you don't have a single dtd file for the full TEI
> guidelines, you have several, and those I tried to import failed with
> lots of errors, possibly because of their intertwined nature.

Or because of bugs in my code :-(

In theory, perhaps we could have multiple xds files, one for each DTD,
with some kind of entity referencing thing going on to reuse the common
features.

(I really need to take a good look at TEI before commenting further I
think - looks like it'd be a nice format to add, and wouldn't be too
hard, I think.  Assuming that the format is "free", and that we don't
have to pay licensing fees or similar...)

OK - I just had a look through the DTD structure of TEI and now I'm
scared!  Lots of fragments of DTD information in multiple files.  The
good thing is that Conglomerate xds files are quite "sloppy", and it
doesn't really matter if you have elements missing, or extra elements.

It might even be worth redesigning how Conglomerate's xds files are
structured to make it easier to handle TEI...

> 
> I managed to load the teixlite.dtd, though, and save a display
> specification for Conglomerate. Same for the Digital Scriptorium dtd,
> which is based on a single dtd file very similar to the TEI Lite one. 
> I still haven't had the time to refine the resulting .xds files, if you
> (Walter, I mean :) are interested we can work together on it,
> subdividing work and checking each other's files.

Please can you post your xds files to this list!  It'd be good to add
them to CVS, and into the tarballs.  That way we can have TEI support
for everyone, from install.  Whenever you find an element that isn't
supported, just add it to the xds file and post a patch to the list.

This would probably be a single "tei.xds" file, or maybe a "tei.xds.in"
file so that we can support translations of the element names.

Are there any sample instance documents that we could freely
redistribute in the "examples" subfolder?  This is much nicer from a
testing point-of-view.

> 
> > Alternatively, load an example document of the type you wish to support,
> > ideally one with a Document Type Declaration referencing a PUBLIC ID
> > with a SYSTEM ID referencing the document type definition via http .
> > 
> > Conglomerate will complain that it doesn't recognise the document type,
> > and ask if you wish to load it anyway. Click on the Force button, and
> > Conglomerate will generate a display specification as it loads the file.
> > You can then go to the Tools menu and select Dump Display Spec. 
> 
> This doesn't fit very well with such rich dtds, although it seems to
> work better on regular TEI files, because you always end up with a small
> subset of the TEI elements.
> 
> > Once you have a working xds file for a document type, you can fine-tune
> > it in some of these ways:
> 
> Thanks for this list, I will look into it ASAP. Walter, drop me a line
> if you're interested in joining forces on this, even if only to check my
> .xds files with your TEI documents.
> 
> Ciao