docbook-apps

I am trying to use the JAXP Transformer in my Java code
to translate valid docbook article XML
into valid XHTML and FO XML. I am having a major problem with
the use of the non-breaking space code   in
the docbook-xsl stylesheets. The cause of the problem
is perfectly described under "5. Be careful with
nonbreaking spaces" on this web page:

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/java/news/javaxslt_0801.html

To summarize, special characters in the docbook-xsl
stylesheets are transformed into the actual special characters
in the output of the transformation when the transformation
method is selected as "xml". So, for example, when
a transformation is done into FO XML, a table title in the
FO XML output contains "Table 1. xxxxx"; however, the spaces
after the word "Table" and after "1." are not the ASCII space
character, they are a single character code 160
(a non-breaking space) which is not valid in an XML file.
From everything I've read, it seems like this is the
correct behavior and other transformers such as xsltproc
replace the single character codes with ASCII characters
on their own as a post process.

For XHTML, I set the output method to "html" instead of
"xml" for the Transformer. This generated   in
the output instead of the single character code 160. This is
acceptable for me because browsers will display the output
of the transformation even though it is not technically valid XHTML.

For FO XML, I don't see a work-around for the problem
other than hand-modifying the docbook-xsl stylesheets
to either replace all the special characters with a
valid ASCII character, or use the disable-output-escaping
XSL attribute (which looks very difficult and support for
this attribute is not a requirement of XSLT processors).

Does anyone have any comments or suggestions?

Thanks,
Don

Don Adams wrote:

> into valid XHTML and FO XML. I am having a major problem with
> the use of the non-breaking space code   in
> the docbook-xsl stylesheets. The cause of the problem
> is perfectly described under "5. Be careful with
> nonbreaking spaces" on this web page:
>
> http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/java/news/javaxslt_0801.html

This is not perfect description, but complete mess. If you have problems
displaying files containing Unicode character with code 160 (U+00A0),
then your browser is unable to infer encoding used correctly. This can
be due misconfigured HTTP server, but there could be other things that
went wrong.

> To summarize, special characters in the docbook-xsl
> stylesheets are transformed into the actual special characters
> in the output of the transformation when the transformation
> method is selected as "xml". So, for example, when
> a transformation is done into FO XML, a table title in the
> FO XML output contains "Table 1. xxxxx"; however, the spaces
> after the word "Table" and after "1." are not the ASCII space
> character, they are a single character code 160
> (a non-breaking space) which is not valid in an XML file.

This character is perfectly valid in XML file. XML file can contain any
Unicode character in element and attribute content.

>>From everything I've read, it seems like this is the
> correct behavior

Seems that you have read wrong resources.

> Does anyone have any comments or suggestions?

You didn't show us your code which is dealing with JAXP. Could it be
that you are using your own stream for writing output of transformation
and you are setting incorrect encoding on this stream?

Jirka

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Jirka Kosek e-mail: jirka@kosek.cz http://www.kosek.cz
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Profesionální školení a poradenství v oblasti technologií XML.
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** XSLT 23.-26.10.2006 ** XML schémata 13.-15.11.2006 **
** DocBook 11.-13.12.2006 ** XSL-FO 11.-12.12.2006 **
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