xml2rfc 2.32.0

Xml2rfc generates RFCs and IETF drafts from document source in XML according to the IETF xml2rfc v2 and v3 vocabularies.

Introduction

The IETF uses a specific format for the standards and other documents it publishes as RFCs, and for the draft documents which are produced when developing documents for publications. There exists a number of different tools to facilitate the formatting of drafts and RFCs according to the existing rules, and this tool, xml2rfc, is one of them. It takes as input an xml file which contains the text and meta-information about author names etc., and transforms it into suitably formatted output. The input xml file should follow the grammars in RFC7749 (for v2 documents) or RFC7991 (for v3 documents). Note that the grammar for v3 is still being refined, and changes will eventually be captured in the bis draft for 7991. Changes not yet captured can be seen in the xml2rfc source v3.rng.

xml2rfc provides a variety of output formats. See the command line help for a full list of formats. It also provides conversion from v2 to v3, and can run the preptool on its input.

Installation

Installation of the python package is done as usual with ‘pip install xml2rfc’, using appropriate switches and/or sudo.

Installation of support libraries for the PDF-formatter

In order to generate PDFs, xml2rfc uses the WeasyPrint module, which depends on external libaries that must be installed as native packages on your platform, separately from the xml2rfc install.

First, install the Cairo, Pango, and GDK-PixBuf library files on your system. See installation instructions on the WeasyPrint Docs:

https://weasyprint.readthedocs.io/en/stable/install.html

(Python 3 is not needed if your system Python is 2.7, though).

(On some OS X systems with System Integrity Protection active, you may need to create a symlink from your home directory to the library installation directory (often /opt/local/lib):

ln -s /opt/local/lib ~/lib

in order for weasyprint to find the installed cairo and pango libraries. Whether this is needed or not depends on whether you used macports or homebrew to install cairo and pango, and the homebrew / macport version.)

Next, install the pycairo and weasyprint python modules using pip. Depending on your system, you may need to use ‘sudo’ or install in user-specific directories, using the –user switch. On OS X in particular, you may also need to install a newer version of setuptools using –user before weasyprint can be installed. If you install with the –user switch, you may need to also set PYTHONPATH, e.g.,

PYTHONPATH=/Users/henrik/Library/Python/2.7/lib/python/site-packages

for Python 2.7.

The basic pip commands (modify as needed according to the text above) are:

pip install ‘pycairo>=1.18’ ‘weasyprint<=0.42.3’

With these installed and available to xml2rfc, the –pdf switch will be enabled.

For PDF output, you also need to install the Noto font set. Download the full set from https://noto-website-2.storage.googleapis.com/pkgs/Noto-unhinted.zip, and install as appropriate for your platform.

Usage

xml2rfc accepts a single XML document as input and outputs to one or more conversion formats.

Basic Usage: xml2rfc SOURCE [options] FORMATS...

Run xml2rfc --help for a full listing of command-line options.

Changelog

Version 2.32.0 (04 Oct 2019)

• Adjusted print font sizes, which were in some cases overly large.

• Added CSS page-break settings to avoid PDF page breaks inside tables and references.

• Tweaked the styling of <aside> to be more aligned with the W3C description of the element.

• Added support for the –legacy-date-format when generating the boilerplate expiry date.

• Fixed an issue with the text width in <aside> text rendering.

• Improved the handling of U+2028 in text output, and fixed a bug in the

• handling of U+2028 in the HTML output.

• Changed default value for –id-is-work-in-progress to True

• Fixed an issue with incorrect section links to appendices.

• Fixed a misspelling of “don’t”. Fixes issue #434.

• Added styling to make HTML <dl> rendering of XML <ol type=’%d’> more like the HTML <ol> and <ul> rendering.

Version 2.31.0 (25 Sep 2019)

This release adds a feature to help with conditional line breaking inside table cells, and tweaks the layout of text in cells slightly. It also fixes an incorrect line-break point and second-line indentation for long section titles in the v3 text formatter. From the commit log:

• Fixed an issue with leading and trailing space padding in table cells, and refined it to consider the alignment setting.

• Modified the text formatter to accept &zwsp; as a potential line-break point.

• Included zwsp in allowed special characters (in addition to nbsp, nbhy, word-joiner and line-separator).

• Fixed the line-breaking and second-line indentation of section titles in v3 text output.

• The start of an emacs nXML mode schema which explicitly mentions xinclud in a couple of places.

• Removed code left in pdf.py by mistake, and set options.pdf=True when in the PdfWriter.

Version 2.30.0 (19 Sep 2019)

• Added logging configuration for weasyprint. This controls the logging level based on the –quiet and –verbose flags, and should make weasyprint logging ouput more consistent across systems.

• Weasyprint reports ERROR if a CSS <link> URL isn’t available, so we won’t insert a <link> for “rfc-local.css” when generating PDF if the file doesn’t exist.

• Tweaked the Makefile to use –add-include in some cases, for regression testing.

• Corrected the <xi:include> links produced during v2v3 conversion with the –add-xinclude switch,

• Changed the code to not retain <!ENTITY> declarations after v2v3 conversion.

• Changed BaseV3Writer.die() to raise an exception, rather than exit on the spot, in order to do the right thing when called as a library.

• Tweaked the command-line messages when a fatal error is raised in a writer.