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Re: Concrete proposal for #480954: Extend textobject toinsert external files


On Mon, Nov 12, 2001 at 11:43:47AM -0500, Norman Walsh wrote:
> The content model of inlinemediaobject is currently:
> 
> inlinemediaobject ::=
> (objectinfo?,
>  (videoobject|audioobject|imageobject),
>  (videoobject|audioobject|imageobject|textobject)*)
> 
> And the stylesheets support a hack whereby you can say
> 
>   <imageobject format="linespecific" fileref="somefile.txt"/>
> 
> and literally insert the content of somefile.txt into the result.

Instead of looking at this as a hack, I'm more tempted to look at it
as "include here an image of this (text) file".  This has for example
a well-defined meaning in terms of "line-wrapping or not", the format
being "linespecific".

What is lacking here, as was already noted, is that we only specify
the file encoding at a high level (character level, ie. how which
character will be rendered at which location in the image), and does
not tell how each character must be interpreted (the character set).

This could be overcomed by using variant formats (linespecific-latin1
and such), but that wouldn't be easy to express with a DTD - I think
it'd be possible with schemas.
Another solution would be to add a "subformat" attribute, whose
interpretation would be format-dependant.  In the case of
"linespecific" it would be a charset; in the case of EPS it could be
"bitmap" or "vector", etc.


> As this RFE suggests, it might be more reasonable to allow textobject
> to directly insert a file by adding entityref and fileref attributes
> to textobject.

I tend not to agree.  At least not as a replacement.

What would be useful would be, in addition to this "show me an image
of the file" we already have, to have an "insert this as text, with
quadding, hyphenation and the like", that would just be interpreted as
CDATA.


Did you have a precise idea of this issue (linespecific vs. CDATA) ?

-- 
Yann Dirson <Yann.Dirson@fr.alcove.com>                 http://www.alcove.com/
Free-Software Engineer                                Ingénieur Logiciel-Libre
Free-Software time manager             Responsable du temps Informatique-Libre
Debian GNU/Linux developper <dirson@debian.org>


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