Hello all,

I've recently come across Prince XML and it looks an exciting proposition! I was hoping someone would be able to help me with the following:

1/ Has anyone had any experience of writing a PhD thesis with the tool? If so, is the CSS and (HT|X)ML available anywhere public to see how you achieved it?
2/ Following on from the above, how does one go about creating a bibliography using Prince XML, with citations throughout the body of the text? How would one go about managing citations?
3/ Is Prince XML the spiritual successor to LaTeX? The parallels between separation of content from format are immense, so I'd be interested in the communities' thoughts on this


Thanks in advance!!

Jon

Hi Jon,



I've found Prince to be an excellent tool for converting XML+CSS to PDF. It works faster, has better results, and is far easier to configure than any other "print-to-PDF" product I've tried (and I've tried a few).

I've have several scientific documents that are written in XML but have many Latex formulas inserted as images. Although the next build of Prince should be able to render MathML, it does not currently render Latex nor does it allow for the (E)PS image insertion so all my Latex segments must be included as bitmaps. Evidently, bitmaps don't display on the screen as nicely in a PDF as PS although they print fine.

There are Latex to MathML convertors but I find that the end product is not nearly as clean/professional as Latex PDF/PS output and I would have to deal with the significant potential for translation errors.

Prince allows for SVG (really cool) as a vector option, but there is no reliable PStoSVG or LatextoSVG product available nor would I consider SVG to be a good candidate for rendering complex Latex equations.

That said, I think Prince is excellent value for our PDF generation projects and we will continue to use it.

Hope this helps.

-John

John Clarke
Cornerstone Systems Northwest Inc.

Hey discofury,

I'm currently writing an undergraduate thesis in XHTML and getting it to PDF with prince, and having a lot of fun with it. It's a bit of extra work but well worth the results I think. The cross-media publishing aspects and the ability for advanced styling with css are both very important for me and Prince is the ideal tool for this.

You can view my work at
https://secure.synergetek.be/repos/thesis/trunk/Thesis/thesis.pdf
for the PDF and
https://secure.synergetek.be/repos/thesis/trunk/Thesis/thesis.html
for the XHTML
Username/Password: guest/guest

Feel free to inspire yourself of the coding and stylesheets, they're based on the Book Microformat as designed by Bert Bos and Håkon Wium Lie (http://www.alistapart.com/articles/boom) which I strongly advise you to read.

I'm following MLA style for my references and bibliography, and use the crossreferencing techniques described both on the A list Apart website and on the prince website in the cross references.

Donald

I'm doing the exact same thing, making a sort of preflight tool in the process.

This tool is php based on wapache (an apache server and embedded IE window in one standalone application), so when it's finished, I will port it to the web. Thing I am implementing are the following

- making a TOC out of elements defined by an xpath expression (e.g. //h1|//h2)
- making an index of elements defined by an xpath expression (//dfn)
- maybe adding a generic meganism for generated lists (isomorphic to CSS3)
- converting inline TeX to Mathml with the aid of asciimathmlphp (see google)
- chopping up a long document in several chapters (based on for instance h1 elements) and saving as seperate html files (fixing links)
- producing lists of figures
- setting up the whole for prince

If there is interest in this, I will publish online the progress (without the embedded prince converter by lack of a server licence), but keep in mind that this is a work in progress.

Yes, I wrote my PhD thesis in Prince. You can find the HTML, CSS, and PDF here: http://people.opera.com/howcome/2006/phd/



I did it by hand in emacs. But I that a future level of CSS will be able to handle it.



LaTeX is certainly one source of inspiration for CSS and Prince. Your can read more about it in my PhD thesis.

-h&kon

I have written a master's thesis. Source files are available: http://hsivonen.iki.fi/thesis/



I wrote a .bib-based bibliography generator that also generates the table of contents, creates an HTML+PNG version (converts SVG figures to PNG), adds an id for each paragraph and assigns definitions gathered from a glossary to each abbr element.

I have not productized or polished my tool, but the source code is available: http://hsivonen.iki.fi/thesis/bib4ht-0.9.tar.gz