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xhtmlpp Version 1.0d

xhtmlpp - The XHTML Preprocessor

Xhtmlpp is a pre-processor for XHTML documents.

XHtmlpp stands for XHTML Pre Processor. It also stands for eXtended HTMLPP, because it is an extention of htmlpp, designed to cope gracefully with XHTML.

• Overview
• Installing Xhtmlpp
• • Getting Xhtmlpp
  • Installation Under Unix
• Getting Started
• Xhtmlpp Reference
• • Description
  • Command-line Syntax
  • Inserting Symbols
  • Types of Symbol
  • Standard Symbols
  • Xhtmlpp Commands
  • Xhtmlpp Macro Processing
  • Multilingual support
  • • Support For Accented Characters
    • Dates Formatting
    • Multilingual Variables
    • Generating Several Language Versions from a Single Source File
  • Xhtmlpp Guru Mode
  • • Standard Guru Mode Definitions
    • Chapter and Section Headers
    • Table of Contents
    • Pagination
    • Page Headers and Footers
    • Paragraphs
    • Text Style
    • Preformatted Text
    • Bulleted and Numbered Lists
    • Definition Lists
    • Tables
    • • Disabling Tables
    • Figures and Images
    • Hyperlinks
    • Special Characters
  • Xhtmlpp Intrinsic Functions
  • • The &date Function
    • The &time Function
    • The &week_day Function
    • The &year_week Function
    • The &julian_date Function
    • The &lillian_date Function
    • The &date_to_days Function
    • The &days_to_date Function
    • The &future_date Function
    • The &past_date Function
    • The &date_diff Function
    • The &image_width Function
    • The &image_height Function
    • The &image_size Function
    • The &file_size Function
    • The &file_date Function
    • The &file_time Function
    • The &normalise Function
    • The &system Function
    • The &upper Function
    • The &lower Function
    • The &pageref Function
    • The &relpath Function
  • Multipass Processing
  • Multipass Debugging
  • Other Things to Know
• Frequently Asked Questions
• • • Why does my .if command not work?
    • Why does my .if command still not work?
    • Why does my .macro command not work?
    • How do I change the .html extension to .htm?
• Other Information
• • Xhtmlpp and Htmlpp
  • • Why Change htmlpp?
    • Differences Between Xhtmlpp and Htmlpp
  • Product History
  • • Version 1.0d
    • Version 1.0c
    • Version 1.0a
    • Version 1.0
    • Version 0.2
    • Version 0.1

Overview

What is xhtmlpp?

• Xhtmlpp is a pre-processor for XHTML documents.
• Its purpose is to simplify the work of writing and packaging large numbers of XHTML documents.
• It acts like a compiler: you provide an input source text and xhtmlpp produces the XHTML documents from that. This is easier and safer than trying to edit and manage separate XHTML documents.
• To use xhtmlpp, you should be comfortable writing XHTML without help from a special XHTML editor. This is not usually a problem, since XHTML is a simple language.
• Xhtmlpp is free software written in Perl, based on htmlpp 4.2a from iMatix. It is distributed with full sources according to the GNU General Public License.

What does xhtmlpp do?

• It can break one input source text file into several XHTML documents. If you want to edit a larger file (because it is faster and easier), but provide the information in smaller pieces on-line (people can access it easier). Xhtmlpp makes this possible.
• Contrariwise, it can combine several input source files into one XHTML document, which is helpful if you have multiple sources for your documents.
• It lets you define symbols like version in one place, then use these in the text like this: $(version) so that you can make changes in a single place only, not throughout the text.
• It creates tables of contents, and links to chain pages together in sequence.
• It adds headers and footers to pages, so that you can keep a consistent style in all XHTML pages.
• It lets you define macros to simplify XHTML markup.
• It converts plain text into XHTML using guru mode.
• It converts accented characters into XHTML metacharacters.
• It allows you to embed Perl code and to include the output of any external program into the page.
• It queries flat-text databases.
• It provides features to build multilingual sites.
• It provides many built-in functions to simplify XHTML writing, like calculating image dimensions, file sizes, working with dates, etc.

How do I use xhtmlpp?

• Take a look at xhtmlpp.xhp, which is the documentation source for xhtmlpp's own on-line documentation. This is the main example for xhtmlpp.
• Edit the source text using any text editor, then run xhtmlpp on the source. It produces a number of XHTML files (extension .htm) which you can test using a browser.
• In general, xhtmlpp generates XHTML pages that use relative addressing, so that pages refer to each other without specifying a host or path. This allows you to test and use the XHTML pages on a local hard disk.

Where do I get xhtmlpp?

• Xhtmlpp is available from the Xhtmlpp website as a tgz file for UNIX. The current version is 1.0d.

What else do I need?

• Xhtmlpp uses Perl 5. It does not use any system-specific features, so will probably run on any box, but this version has only been tested under UNIX (RedHat 7.1 Linux, to be precise).
• Perl is a programming language written by Larry Wall that is freely available for many platforms. If you never installed or used Perl, this is an excellent time to start.
• Xhtmlpp also uses the perl module Image::Size, which you can download from cpan.

What Are The Alternatives?

• A lot of work by hand.
• The original htmlpp at http://www.imatix.com/
• A number of other products work somewhat like xhtmlpp. Take a look at the eponymously named htmlpp at http://www.eleves.ens.fr:8080/home/nthiery.