Re: Generating PDFs with Ada

["Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57)" <yannick_duchene@yahoo.fr>]

Le Sun, 16 Jan 2011 04:13:50 +0100, Elias Salomão Helou Neto  
<eshneto@gmail.com> a écrit:
> This one is hard with TeX. Still, there seems to be some recent
> advances, I just don't recall the TeX variant that tries to tackle the
> issue.
This is the big one which weighted 1GB (ouch). Forget the name too, I mark  
this topic and will e-mail you if ever I get this name back.

> Do you mean ligatures? This is perfectly possible. Otherwise, please
> explain better what you mean.
This is indeed related to ligature and is a kind of ligature, while more  
complex. With some language, the shape of a letter totally change  
depending on its context. The most common example is Arabic. Unicode has  
defined Arabic Presentation Forms for that purpose (Form-A and Form-B).  
You may find it here:
http://www.unicode.org/charts/
in “Middle Eastern Scripts”

Some examples here (one of my own site, french, but you can still look at  
the table at the end of the page):
http://www.les-ziboux.rasama.org/ecriture-arabe-cursive.html


> OTOH this may not be true even if modifications are required. For
> example, I may have lost it, but was there any agreement on how to go
> from XML to PDF?
Yes, there is a common one already mentioned here, which is XSL-FO. Two of  
the most famous way to turn an XML document into another are: XSL (mainly  
for XML -> XML and XML -> HTML) and XSL-FO (mainly for XML -> PDF). XSL is  
for transformation of a markups document into another markups document,  
and XSL-FO is transformation of a markups document into a representation  
on a render device (screen, PDF, etc). This can be compared to what CSS is  
to HTML (a simplified view).

Feel free to e-mail me if you need more details (as I am jobless, I am  
also available for services in this area, if ever you need).


-- 
Si les chats miaulent et font autant de vocalises bizarres, c’est pas pour  
les chiens.

“I am fluent in ASCII” [Warren 2010]