Quark-Xpress-Tags-to-xml 1.1

Convert Quark Xpress tagged text (Tags, xtags) to XML.

This module is intended as a pre-processing step in the conversion of Quark Xpress tagged text to (semantic) HTML; as such it does not attempt to convert every single tag to XML, but only those that are relevant to the production of semantic, HTML5-compliant HTML.

This means that Paragraph and Character style sheet definitions are ignored; we only care about the apllied style sheet names. It also means that import character attributes like <i> and <b>, but ignore tags related to print typesseting only (tracking, kerning, baseline shift, etc.) by default , though they can be turned on.

The module doen’t actually produced XML but an Element Tree, in case you’d like to do further processing on the tree itself before serialising it with lxml.etree.tostring(). The serialised XML can then be turned to HTML with e.g. BeautifulSoup for postprocessing (for example, mapping Quark paragraph stylesheet to CSS classes, character tags and stylesheets to semantic HTML tags, rolling up indented quotes to <blockquote>, etc.)

Outputs UTF-8.

Usage:

>>> from quark_tagged_text import get_encoding, to_xml
>>> from lxml.etree import tostring
>>> encoding = get_encoding(<source file>)
>>> with open(<source file>, encoding=encoding) as tagged_text:
>>>     element_tree = to_xml(tagged_text)
>>> serialised_xml = tostring(element_tree, encoding='utf-8')

You can also call to_xml with a css=True argument. This will attempt to convert some character styles into inline CSS (works with fonts, small caps, uppercase, strikethrough).