TeXFOTBuilder: a Generic TeX backend for Jade

By David Megginson, Sebastian Rahtz and Kathleen Marszalek

Introduction

The TeXFOTBuilder was initially written by David Megginson, but is now maintained by Sebastian Rahtz. In a development sponsored by Novare International (to whom many thanks!), Kathleen Marszalek drastically improved the table support.

The job of the backend is to map DSSSL flow-objects into generic TeX macro calls. Atomic flow objects appear as single \insertOBJECT{} macro calls, while non-atomic flow objects appear as nested pairs of \OBJECT{}..\endOBJECT{} macro calls.

The \insertOBJECT and \OBJECT calls receive a single argument, which is a list of definitions for inherited and non-inherited characteristics (see below). For example, the following DSSSL handler:

(element P
  (make paragraph
	start-indent: 6pt))

would generate the following TeX calls:

\startPar{\def\StartIndent{6pt}}%
CONTENTS
\endPar{}

It is important to note that any characters with values >255 will appear as \Character{value} macro calls ie.

\Character{1024}

In addition to nearly all of the flow-object classes currently supported by Jade, the TeXFOTBuilder generates two pseudo flow-object macro calls:

• \FOT{version}
• \endFOT{}

These are guaranteed to appear at the very beginning and very end of the .tex output file, and give your macros a chance to grab control at both points. The argument to \FOT is the version of the TeX markup generated by the Jade backend (currently 2). Macro packages should check this for compatibility.

The output .tex file is not ready to be passed directly through TeX or LaTeX -- instead, it is necessary to have TeX macro definitions for all of the flow-object macros, and to set default values for the characteristics. The macros can use of TeX primitives, plain TeX, LaTeX, or any other format which is convenient.

A LaTeX macro package for use with the output of this backend has been developed by Sebastian Rahtz. The current stable release can be found on CTAN in macros/jadetex; experimental releases will be placed at http://www.tug.org/applications/jadetex/ at intervals.

Characteristics

The SETTINGS argument to the flow-object macros will contain a series of \def statements for both inherited and non-inherited characteristics. These will appear only when the characteristic's value differs from the standard default (in the case of non-inherited characteristics) or from the current value (in the case of inherited characteristics). Since these statements appear as an argument, they will not take effect until you reference the parameter explicitly.

Inherited Characteristics

The characteristics in the following table are inherited -- you should set these to their default values only once, at the beginning of the parse (but they should always revert to their previous values after a flow-object has finished):