How is the "nomade" pdf created?
Who are we? Why are we on Earth? And most importantly: how is the e-book
L'âme nomade (The nomad soul) created? The process is indeed based on a simple approach (inspired by
Wikipedia Books). Each story is written in extensible markup language (XML) following some specific document type definition:
<story>
<title></title>
<subtitle></subtitle>
<language></language>
<date></date>
<foreword></foreword>
<body>
<p></p>
<p></p>
...
</body>
</story>
These XML files feed a script which produces
individual stories in XHTML and a PDF book containing all the stories, as illustrated in the following picture.
![[The nomad soul: scheme]](../../pix/code/nomad-scheme.png)
Strangely colored schematic overview of the automated xhtml/pdf generation system
To produce the book, the script needs to know which stories to include, and in which order. For this purpose an input list enumerates the files to process. Those are basically filtered and concatenated, and a cover is inserted at the beginning as well as a backcover appended at the end. To have a valid XML structure everything is enclosed in some <all></all> tags. Then the resulting XML file is magically metamorphosed into a LaTeX source file, thanks to the eXtensible Stylesheet Language for Transformations (XSLT).
For each story the language is defined with a <language></language> tag, setting the adequate argument to the \selectlanguage LaTeX command, which has consequences on the text layout in terms of spacings. The tag is also used to configure quoting signs. The font chosen for the text is the beautiful AntikwaTorunska. Ultimately the source is compiled to produce a PDF document.
Little Neo, 2009
Code
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