Technical Issues

Technical Issues

The MultiMarkdown system is actually a fairly complex group of programs, which includes multiple perl utilities, a PHP program, and multiple XSLT files. With some hand waving, I try to make it look like a single coherent program, but it actually uses multiple utilities written by multiple people.

This section is designed to address some of these issues, and implications they may have for users, programmers, etc.

XML Namespace Issues

As of version 2.0.a3, there has been a complete overhaul of the way XML namespaces are handled. This required changing all of the XSLT files to use an "html" alias for the "http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" namespace.

It appears to be working, including support for MathML.

If you have any custom XSLT files, you will need to make the same changes, specifically:

Make your stylesheet declaration look like:

<xsl:stylesheet
	xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
	xmlns:html="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
	version="1.0">

And relabel any references to XHTML elements, so that they are preceeded by "html:", e.g.

<xsl:template match="/">
	<xsl:apply-templates select="html/head"/>
	<xsl:apply-templates select="html/body"/>
	<xsl:call-template name="latex-footer"/>
</xsl:template>

should look like this:

<xsl:template match="/">
	<xsl:apply-templates select="html:html/html:head"/>
	<xsl:apply-templates select="html:html/html:body"/>
	<xsl:call-template name="latex-footer"/>
</xsl:template>

I have left the -novalid and -nonet options in place to prevent unnecessary errors when you are not connected to the internet, but these could be removed if desired.

XeLaTeX Tips

If you are using XeLaTeX to process your document (useful for utilizing Mac OS X fonts in your document), you want to use font declarations like this:

\font\addressbold="Garamond Bold:mapping=tex-text" at 8pt

By including the ":mapping=tex-text" portion, you regain use of smart quotes, en- and em- dashes, etc. I'm sure most XeLaTeX users know this, but it took me a bit of trial and error to discover it....