[DDI-users] Passing line breaks to DDI-XML

[I-Lin Kuo]

Hi Freddy,

Sorry to reply to this so late.

The whitespace is part of the XML -- if you programically access the DOM 
using any of the familiar XML APIs, you have access to all the whitespace. 
However, most applications (such as IE or XML Spy) which display XML will 
collapse the whitespace in the display by default, but that doesn't mean 
it's not there.

As mentioned before, you can force a browser to display whitespace using 
the <pre> tag. If you're using XSL, then probably your XSL processor is 
processing the whitespace but not displaying it -- you should be able to 
see the whitespace if you output to a file rather than to screen.
If not, then that means for some reason your XSL processor is stripping out 
the whitespace, but it shouldn't do that because by default, whitespace is 
supposed to be preserved. You can try to explicitly instruct it to preserve 
the whitespace via <xsl:preserve-space>

As for formatting for large text elements, right now we're working on 
incorporating a very limited set of  markup tags (about 9 or so) into the 
next DDI DTD.

 >Hi all,

 >I'm new to this group. Working at the Swiss archive SIDOS, we are busy =
 >preparing our dataset documentations for a common DDI based CESSDA data =
 >catalogue, to be published one day by Nesstar. I'm programming an =
 >interface which exports our database contents to DDI-XML-files.

 >Here one of my questions:

 >Some database fields (abstract etc.) contain simple formatting =
 >(paragraphs, linefeeds, bullets). Is there a way to PASS this =
 >information into XML? How? Actually, all 'white space' is translated to =
 >one space.=20

 >For big text elements, it would be nice to keep basic formatting like =
 >paragraphs. Can CR/LF be converted in a way to take them up by an XSL, =
 >and also by Nesstar (this should rather be addressed to the Nesstar =
 >folks.).

 >As far as I see, the DDI-DTD should contain some specifications allowing =
 >to pass layout information.

 >For my intermediate results, see: =
 >http://www.static.sidos.ch/Index_idc.htm
 >For additional remarks, see: =
 >http://www.static.sidos.ch/index_idc_remarks.htm


 >Fredy Kuhn, Sidos



I-Lin Kuo, ICPSR
Macromedia Certified ColdFusion 5.0 Advanced Developer
Sun Certified Java 2 Programmer
Ann Arbor, MI