PDFlib Text Extraction Toolkit (TET) Manual

8.4 Transforming TETML with XSLT
Very short overview of XSLT. XSLT (which stands for eXtensible Stylesheet Language
Transformations) is a language for transforming XML documents to other documents.
While the input is always an XML document (a TETML document in our case), the output
does not necessarily have to be XML. XSLT can also perform arbitrary calculations and
produce plain text or HTML output. We will use XSLT stylesheets to process TETML input
in order to generate a new dataset (provided in text, XML, CSV, or HTML format)
based on the input which in turn reflects the contents of a PDF document. The TETML
document has been created with the TET command-line tool or the TET library as explained
in Section 8.1, »Creating TETML«, page 89.
While XSLT is very powerful, it is considerably different from conventional programming
languages. We do not attempt to provide an introduction to XSLT programming
in this section; please refer to the wide variety of printed and Web resources on this topic.
We restrict our samples to XSLT 1.0. Although XSLT 2.0 implementations are available,
they are not yet in widespread use compared to XSLT 1.0. The XSLT 1.0 specification
can be found at www.w3.org/TR/xslt.
However, we do want to assist you in getting XSLT processing of TETML documents
up and running quickly. This section describes the most important environments for
Fig. 8.2
TETML element hierarchy for
the page contents.
8.4 Transforming TETML with XSLT 97