Re: Figures in APT require extension

On Jan 21, 2009, at 11:34 AM, Lukas Theussl wrote:

> Imagine for some obscure reason you would want to use doxia to  
> transform a document from xdoc to latex to xhtml and back to xdoc.  
> The final result should be identical to the original, which would  
> not be possible if doxia changed some input on the way.

I have trouble imaging a situation where I'd need to convert a file to  
the format it's already in. Even if there were, it's virtually  
impossible to guarantee that all information will be preserved in a  
round-trip conversion. There will always be a case where something  
simply can't be expressed the same way (or at all) in some other format.

> Another argument is that the automatic selection of format only  
> works if the output format supports only one figure extension (eg  
> latex only supports eps), but  how do you choose the image in html,  
> where you can have jpg, png, gif... ?

The automatic selection is normally used to choose between a raster  
format and a vector format, and JPG, PNG, and GIF are all raster, so  
the author would only create one of them.

The issues you raise are valid, but in practice, I don't think they're  
a big concern, at least not compared to the problem of choosing the  
appropriate raster vs. vector figures to match the output format,  
which apparently is impossible now.

Trevor