translating LaTeX to XML

[Michael Friendly]

I have a LaTeX document describing a long list of items that I want to translate to XML to treat these as a database. I've written a perl script to do the basic translation, and a basic DTD file, but I am stumped at translating LaTeX character encodings to something XML won't choke on.

I found GNU recode to solve most of this, using

cat milestone.tex | recode -d tex..xml | itemdb -s xml -o milestone.xml

where itemdb is my perl script, and I've gotten rid of the diacritical characters, but I'm getting errors with &s in URLs:

XML Parsing Error: not well-formed
Location: file:///home/friendly/SCS/Gallery/milestone/Private/milestone.xml Line Number 2397, Column 101: <commentary url="http://historical.library.cornell.edu/cgi-bin/cul.math/docviewer?did=00620001&seq=3" text="Text of d'Ocagne'sbook on parallel coordinates" />
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------^

(This is from the mozilla browser, trying to load the milestone.xml file.) I'm pretty much a newbie with XML, so I don't know whether it is a problem with my DTD or what tools are available (debian linux)

-Michael

 

[Patrick TJ McPhee]

% url="http://historical.library.cornell.edu/cgi-bin/cul.math/docviewer?did=00620001&seq=3"

You must encode & as &amp; and < as &gt; anywhere they appear as text in any XML document, so this should be

url="http://historical.library.cornell.edu/cgi-bin/cul.math/docviewer?did=00620001&amp;seq=3"

(Must might be a bit strong here, you could get away with & and < if you find that more aesthetically pleasing.)