The first steps with OpenJade and onsgmls

In this section we will have a brief look at the two tools openjade and onsgmls. At the moment we will use them by typing commands on the command line. This will give you some understanding about these tools, but keep in mind that you will be able to run these tools with a few mouseclicks from within Emacs at a later stage of this tutorial.

At first, we will check whether our test.sgml is a valid SGML file. As onsgmls is a command-line application, first open a NT command-line window. Change to the directory where your test.sgml was saved to and type the following command:

c:\user\myself> onsgmls -s test.sgml

This will parse the document and list any errors that it contains. Don't worry if onsgmls produces no output on the screen. This Unix-style brevity just means that there were no errors. To see an error message, change a tag in your test.sgml source file, e.g. change a h1 tag to read h and run onsgmls again.

Before we can try to process our test document with OpenJade, we need a stylesheet for our DTD. We will use a very simple stylesheet to create printable output from the test file that you created in the previous chapter. The stylesheet is borrowed from Paul Prescod, just like the DTD. Open a new file with the name test.dsl in the same directory as your test.sgml and type in or paste the following lines:

      
    <!DOCTYPE style-sheet PUBLIC "-//James Clark//DTD DSSSL Style Sheet//EN" >
    <style-sheet>
    <style-specification>
    <style-specification-body>

      (element HTMLlite (make simple-page-sequence))

      (element H1
      (make paragraph
      font-family-name: "Times New Roman"
      font-weight: 'bold
      font-size: 20pt
      line-spacing: 22pt
      space-before: 15pt
      space-after: 10pt
      start-indent: 6pt
      first-line-start-indent: -6pt
      quadding: 'center
      keep-with-next?: #t))

      (element P
      (make paragraph
      font-family-name: "Times New Roman"
      font-size: 12pt
      line-spacing: 13.2pt
      space-before: 6pt
      start-indent: 6pt
      quadding: 'start))

      (element EM
      (make sequence
      font-posture: 'italic))

      (element STRONG
      (make sequence
      font-weight: 'bold))
    </style-specification-body>
    </style-specification>
    </style-sheet>
      
   

openjade is a command-line tool, just like onsgmls. Open a command-line window from your start menu. Change into the directory which contains your test SGML source and your stylesheet. There are some command-line options (see the file index.html in the OpenJade\jadedoc subdirectory), but all we need to know right now is the -t option to select the backend and the -d option to specify the stylesheet. We want to create a RTF file from our document, so the command is:

c:\user\myself> openjade -t rtf -d test.dsl test.sgml

openjade should silently create the file test.rtf in the current directory. Try to open this document with any RTF-capable word processor (WordPad is sufficient for such a simple file).

Feel free to modify the stylesheet to better understand the effect of the style specifications. Change the font sizes or the fonts themselves, or change the line spacing. Use the additional Jade command line option -o output_file to provide a different output filename, e.g. test1.rtf, so you can easily compare the original output and the output created with your modified stylesheet.

With just a little more effort, we can also utilize the TeX backend and our TeX installation to create printable output:

C:\user\myself>openjade -t tex -d test.dsl test.sgml

This will create the file test.tex. This is a LaTeX file which needs some special macros (the JadeTeX stuff) to be interpreted correctly by TeX. So the command line is:

C:\user\myself>jadetex test.tex

This should create the standard set of .aux, .log, and .dvi files.

Create and view a PostScript document from your test.dvi. To this end, type the command:

C:\user\myself>dvips -o test.ps test.dvi

and view the resulting file with:

C:\user\myself>gsview32 test.ps

Alternatively, try to directly create a PDF document by typing:

C:\user\myself>pdfjadetex test.tex

View the PDF file by typing:

C:\user\myself>gsview32 test.pdf