Jade - James' DSSSL Engine

Contents

• What is Jade?
• Copyright
• Getting Jade
• Building Jade
  • Win32
  • Unix
• Using Jade
• Jade Extensions
• Current Jade Limitations
• Backends
  • RTF
  • XML Flow Object Tree
  • TeX
  • MIF
  • SGML Transformation
• Reading the Jade Sources
• Reporting Bugs in Jade
• Contributing to Jade

What is Jade?

Jade is an implementation of the DSSSL style language. The current version is 1.2.1.

For general information about DSSSL, see my DSSSL page.

You can discuss Jade and get help from other users on DSSSList, the DSSSL Users' Mailing List. I will announce new versions of Jade on DSSSList. To subscribe send mail to majordomo@mulberrytech.com with "subscribe dssslist" as the body of your message. To subscribe to the digest instead, the body should be "subscribe dssslist-digest". The list is archived.

Jade includes the following components:

• An abstract interface to groves. This is designed to be implementable on top of a database, in addition to simple in-memory implementations.

  The source is in the grove directory.

• An in-memory implementation of this interface built with SP.

  This is multi-threaded (on Win32 only at the moment): the grove can be accessed before it is complete and access to a property of a node will block until that property becomes available. This allows the style engine to produce output before it has read all the document.

  The source is in the spgrove directory.

• A style engine that implements the DSSSL style language. This depends on the grove interface, but not the spgrove implementation of that interface. It depends on SP for the parsing of DSSSL specifications. The style engine relies on a backend to actually do the formatting. The backend interface is designed to accomodate browsers as well as command-line applications, but it does not currently provide interfaces that would allow for editing either of SGML documents or DSSSL specs.

  The source is in the style directory.

• A command-line application, jade, that combines the style engine with the spgrove grove interface and five backends:
  • A backend that generates an XML representation of the flow object tree.
  • A backend that generates RTF. This has been tested with Microsoft Word 97 and Microsoft's free Word Viewer 97. Previous versions were tested with Word 95 and Word Viewer 7.1.
  • A backend that generates TeX.
  • A backend that generates MIF.
  • A backend that generates SGML. This is used in conjunction with non-standard flow object classes to generate SGML, thus allowing Jade to be used for SGML transformations.

  The source is in the jade directory.

Jade Copyright

Jade is licensed under the same terms as SP. This imposes almost no restrictions even for commercial use.

If you do use Jade in a commercial product, I would ask you, as a courtesy, to let me know about it and acknowledge the use of Jade.

Getting Jade

If you're using Windows 95 or Windows NT, then you all you need is in the