Exciting new features in XSLT 3 for book publishers by Liam Quin.
From the post:
…
For e-publishers, the ability of XSLT 3 engines to read from and write to zip archives means you can generate EPUB files directly, or even extract files from ebooks. You can also process binary files, so that it’s possible to work out the size of a bitmap image in pixels, which is useful when embedding graphics into web pages or ebooks. And you can process text files a line at a time with fn:unparsed-text-lines().Probably the single feature that’s the biggest game-changer for most people in publishing, the most fun, and that gives the largest reduction in costs, is the ability to call XSLT from within XSLT using the new fn:transform() function. This means you can easily build a collection of documents, such as making an EPUB 3 zip file, even if it involves running a separate transformation to create some or all of the components such as the spine or table of contents or index, without resorting to complex batch scripts or other programming languages. This reduces the number of programming or scripting languages you need in a project, reduces the number of components, controls the way the components interlock, and results in something easier to understand and maintain by the same person who works with the underlying XSLT transformations.
…
Part of a tease for Quin’s presentation at: EBOOKCRAFT March 18-19, 2019 | MaRS Discovery District. Videos from 2018 are available.
I like to think of XQuery and XSLT as ways to liberate and transform data, but I have to concede they have legitimate purposes as well. 😉
If you are an ebook publisher, Quin’s presentation at EBookCraft should be on your must-attend calendar.