HTMLevator

HTMLevator is a series of enhancement utilities for improving HTML documents. These tools can be used on HTML files made from .docxs with XSweet, or on other, arbitrary HTML files. HTMLevator features include:

• Semantic structure inferring, adding headings and sections to flat HTML files
• Copyediting cleanups to normalize text
• Tools to add customized transformations in simplified syntax

Contents#

• Heading promotion
  • Formatting-based analysis
  • Outline-level heading promotion
  • Custom configuration
• Plain text URL linking
• Plain text list tagging
• Copyediting cleanups
  • ucp-text-macros.xsl
  • ucp-mappings.xsl
• Custom transformations (experimental)
• Section inferrer (experimental)

Heading promotion#

HTMLevator includes a feature that attempts to infer which elements are headings, transforming them  from <p>s into headings: <h1> through <h6>. This is more art than science, as the input is generally not semantically tagged and structured. It is sometimes trivial to infer headers but it is also frequently quite difficult or impossible to do so unassisted or programmatically. As such, heading promotion will not catch all headings all the time, and it will work better on some documents than on others.

There are 3 heading promotion strategies built into XSweet:

1. Format-based analysis (default)
2. Outline-level heading promotion
3. Custom configuration for named Word styles or specific text

The header-promote/header-promotion-CHOOSE.xsl sheet will try to pick the best approach to use for a given document:

• If no custom configurations are supplied, header-promotion-CHOOSE.xsl checks to see whether outline levels appear to have been used. If outline level data exists, it is used as the basis for heading promotion
• If outline levels have not been used, format-based analysis is used to infer and promote headings

Alternatively, you can specify the header promotion method to use by passing it as a runtime parameter with header-promotion-CHOOSE.xsl:

• method=ranked-format
• method=outline-level
• method=my-styles.xml

Format-based analysis#

As a rule, authors indicate headings with visual formatting far more commonly than by applying named MS Word styles. It’s not possible to have a discrete list of what kind of formatting indicates a heading, as it changes from file to file and is highly contextual. Instead, each individual document and its formatting must be analyzed as a whole before making guesses about headings. Format-based heading promotion does just this.

This approach works well for some documents and poorly for others. One size does not fit all, and the approach is simply to optimize for what works well with the greatest number of documents. Table of contents and reference files often contain many short paragraphs, leading to erroneous heading promotion.

The header-promote/digest-paragraphs.xsl sheet performs this file analysis. It makes a representation of every <p> in the document with relevant formatting properties:

• font-size
• font-style
• font-weight
• text-decoration
• color
• text-align

Next, it sorts paragraphs into groups that share identical formatting, one group for each distinct combination of properties. These groups are candidates for promotion from <p> to <h1-6>. HTMLevator considers:

• How many paragraphs are formatted the same way
• The average paragraph length in each format group
• How often paragraphs in one format group appear in continuous runs (and thus probably aren’t headings)
• Whether paragraphs are all caps

Decisions about what to consider headings are made as follows:

• Anything that is right-aligned is not considered for heading promotion
• The most common type of paragraph in the document (i.e. the combination of paragraph properties that occurs the most) is not considered for heading promotion
• Promote a paragraph group to headings if:
  • The average run of consecutive paragraphs styled the same way is 4 or fewer (long runs of <p>s with the same styling suggest the paragraphs aren’t headings), AND
  • The font size specified is not the smallest font size found in the document, AND
  • The average length of paragraphs with the given set of properties is not more than 120 characters
• Promote a paragraph group if it is:
  • Centered, AND
  • Less than 200 characters in average length, AND
  • The average consecutive paragraph run is less than 2
• Promote a paragraph group if it never ends in a period

After HTMLevator has identified paragraph groups to mark as headings, it must guess the outline level. It does so based on the following attributes, in these order:

1. Font size (bigger = higher heading level)
2. Italics
3. Bold
4. Underline
5. Always caps

Generally speaking, HTMLevator’s heading detection does a better job detecting headings than it does at guessing the heading’s level.

XSLT sequence#

This is the default heading promotion method, run if outline level data is not present. You can also run this method=ranked-format

1. First, header-promote/digest-paragraphs.xsl makes the paragraph groupings, and guesses what formats should be headings (and what level those headings should be).
2. The header-promote/make-header-escalator-xslt.xsl sheet uses the digest-paragraphs.xsl output as its input, which it uses to produce a bespoke XSL sheet.
3. Running this sheet on the original HTML file implements the heading promotion, replacing the <p>s thought to be headings with <h1-6>.

Outline-level heading promotion#

An outline level can be specified on a paragraph in Word (which often comes from a named Word style. Some writers use this outlining functionality in Word, either deliberately, or implicitly through careful use of named styles. In these instances, outline levels are often a reliable indicator of headings and heading levels.

When outline levels are specified in Word’s XML (e.g. <w:outlineLvl w:val="0"/>), they are extracted by XSweet as an -xsweet-outline-level property on the <p>.

When this property is present at least twice in the HTML document, the header-promote/header-promotion-CHOOSE.xsl sheet will elect to use outline levels to promote headings.

Custom configuration#

To create a custom configuration:

1. Create a custom mapping (my-styles.xml or what have you). See the example provided in config-mockup.xml for syntax.
2. Run the header-promotion-CHOOSE.xsl sheet, passing the custom mapping .xml sheet as a runtime parameter (method=my-styles.xml)
3. The make-header-mapper-xslt.xsl will generate and apply custom XSL sheet based on your XML file

Plain text URL linking#

hyperlink-inferencer/hyperlink-inferencer.xsl#

This sheet searches for plain-text URLs and automatically links them. It can recognize links with the following TLDs:

• .com
• .org
• .net
• .gov
• .mil
• .edu
• .io
• .foundation
• country TLDs

XSweet looks for a top level domain preceded by preceded by one or more strings that contain only letters, numbers, underscores and dashes (no spaces or other punctuation). These strings can be separated by periods (".") Note that this rule will capture a www. if it is present.

XSweet will recognizes and include in the link the protocol, if it has been specified (http://, https://, ftp:). If the protocol has not been specified, the link’s href will be appended with http://.

This sheet will also capture query strings on links.

Plain text list tagging#

DETECT-ITEMIZE-LISTS.xsl#

This module will recognize plain text that looks like a numbered lists and mark the corresponding list (as an <ol>) and list items (<li>s).

DETECT-ITEMIZE-LISTS.xsl runs from within it 3 separate sheets in sequence:

• detect-numbered-lists.xsl, which detects lists and bookends them with <xsw:list xmlns:xsw="http://coko.foundation/xsweet" level="0">
• itemize-detected-lists.xsl, which converts the <xsw:list> tags to <ol>, and wraps each paragraph in <li>s
• scrub-literal-numbering-lists.xsl, which removes from each list item the leading whitespace, literal text numbering, the period, and the whitespace after it

Lists must match the following pattern to be detected and marked as a numbered list:

• Each list item paragraph may start with any amount of white space (including none), followed by
• a string of one or more numerals, followed by
• a period, followed by
• one or more white space characters.
• Further, at least two or more consecutive paragraphs must meet these criteria to be marked as a list

List items that meet this criteria are scrubbed of their literal numbering (and following white space) in favor of automatically generated <ol> numbering.

Note that this feature creates a flat list (one level), rather than nested lists based on indentation.

This module can be run before or after the PROMOTE-lists.xsl feature in XSweet Core. To use it, you can modify the execute_chain.sh file of the XSweet_runner_scripts to include this step before the final-rinse.xsl step.

See also the documentation for marked list handling.

Copyediting cleanups#

ucp-cleanup/ucp-text-macros.xsl#

This sheet contains a suite of text cleanups, built specifically for use by the University of California Press. It automates many copyediting improvements:

• Hyphens between numerals are converted to en dashes

• Two or more consecutive spaces are converted to a single space

• Any number of spaces before or after em dashes are removed

• Series of periods are converted to ellipses

• Two adjacent hyphens become an em dash

• En dashes surrounded on both sides by spaces are converted to an em dash

• Equal signs are normalized to be surrounded by one space on either side

• Spaces adjacent to tabs are removed

• Spaces at the beginning and end of paragraphs are removed

• Tabs at the end of paragraphs are removed

• Empty paragraphs are removed

• Single and double quotation marks (including backticks) are converted to directional quotation marks

• Hair spaces are inserted between single and double quotation marks

• Punctuation marks are coerced to match the formatting of the previous word; e.g. <i>extraordinary</i>! becomes <i>extraordinary!</i>. This rule applies to the following punctuation marks:

  • "
  • '
  • :
  • ;
  • ?
  • !

ucp-cleanup/ucp-mappings.xsl#

In this step, underlining and bolding is converted to italics, either as inline tags or style CSS:

• <b>s and <u>s are replaced with <i>s
• style="font-weight: bold" and style="text-decoration: underline" become style="font-style: italic"

Short and sweet.

Custom transformations (experimental)#

The files in the html-tweak folder can be used to extend XSweet, by defining custom transformations to apply to the text. This can be done on a per-document basis, or to implement generic rules according to your use case.

Use is as follows:

1. Define the custom transformations to be applied in an .xml file
2. Run the APPLY-html-tweaks.xsl sheet, referencing the above transformations defined in your xml file. This: (A) reads the user-defined transformations from your .xml file (B) creates a new XSL sheet based on the .xml file that will implement the specified transformation (done with the make-html-tweak-xslt.xsl sheet) (C) applies the created XSL sheet to the input file

Example use (exact script will depend upon how you are running your XSLT: XSLT my-source.html APPLY-html-tweaks.xsl config=my-html-tweaks.xml

Tweak definition syntax#

The user-specified tweaks work by establishing matches between categories of HTML elements (most commonly but certainly not limited to <p>s or <span>s), as indicated by:

• CSS property or CSS property-value (on a style attribute), or
• Named classes (the class attribute)

The syntax to define HTML tweaks uses the following components:

• where: a wrapper for a rule
• match: conditions on an element for it to match
• style: a style property name or property-name: value combination
• class: a class value (name token)

Example 1#

Remove Default classes from HTML elements where they appear:

<p class="Default">Here is default class paragraph</p>

becomes:

<p>Here is default class paragraph</p>

HTML tweak rule:

<where>
    <match><class>Default</class></match>
    <remove><class>Default</class></remove>
</where>

Example 2#

Remove a specific styling property wherever it’s present:

<p style="text-indent:1em; margin-bottom: 1em">Styling includes a property</p>

becomes:

<p  style="text-indent:1em">Styling includes a property</p>

HTML tweak rule:

<where>
    <match><style>margin-bottom</style></match>
    <remove><style>margin-bottom</style></remove>
</where>

Example 3#

Remove a style property if it has a given value:

<p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12pt">Remove a property if it has a specific value</p>

becomes:

<p style="font-size: 12pt">Remove a property if it has a specific value</p>

HTML tweak rule:

<where>
    <match><style>font-family: Helvetica</style></match>
    <remove><style>font-family</style></remove>
</where>

Example 4#

The following tweak rule will map a specific class and style to another class and style:

<where>
    <match>
      <style>font-size: 18pt</style>
      <class>FreeForm</class>
    </match>
    <remove>
      <style>font-size</style>
      <class>FreeForm</class>
    </remove>
    <add>
      <class>FreeFormNew</class>
      <style>color: red</style>
    </add>
</where>  

For further examples, see the demo files included in the repository:

• html-tweak-map.xml defines example transformation definitions
• html-tweak-demo.xsl is the resulting XSL sheet made by the make-html-tweak-xslt.xsl, which will effect the specified transformation. (This relies on the html-tweak-lib.xsl file as a dependency)

Section inferrer (experimental)#

This utility uses headings (<h1-6>) as markers and attempts to add <section>s to an HTML file. It is run as a single XSL sheet, induce-sections/induce-sections.xsl, which returns the document HTML file unchanged except for the addition of <section> tags.

• Sections are only added when higher-level headings wrap lower-level ones. Lower-level headings wrapping higher-level ones are not captured as <section>s
• Paragraphs and blocks preceding the first header, appear without a section wrapper (before the first section)
• Paragraphs and all other elements travel with the immediately preceding header
• Files with no headings are unchanged
• Your document must be wrapped in a <div class="docx-body"> for this sheet to work. It will be wrapped if it has been extracted by XSweet; otherwise you will have to add this element yourself
• If headings skip levels, a note will be added: <!-- Headers out of regular order: h1, h2, h3, h1, h3-->

Example:

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
  <head>
    <meta charset="utf-8"></meta>
    <title>sections</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <div class="docx-body">
      <h1>h1</h1>
        <p>h1 para</p>
      ## h2
        <p>h2 para</p>
      ### h3
        <p>h3 para</p>
        <p>h3 para</p>
      <h1>h1</h1>
        <p>h1 para</p>
      ### h3
        <p>h3 para</p>
      </div>
  </body>
</html>

becomes

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
  <head>
    <meta charset="utf-8" />
    <title>sections</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <div class="docx-body">
      <!-- Headers out of regular order: h1, h2, h3, h1, h3-->
      <section>
        <h1>h1</h1>
        <p>h1 paragraph</p>
        <section>
          ## h2
          <p>h2 para</p>
          <section>
            ### h3
            <p>h3 para</p>
            <p>h3 para</p>
          </section>
        </section>
      </section>
      <section>
        <h1>h1</h1>
        <p>h1 paragraph</p>
        <section>
          ### h3
          <p>h3 para</p>
        </section>
      </section>
    </div>
  </body>
</html>

mark-sections.xsl and nest-sections.xsl are deprecated; the induce-sections.xsl sheet encapsulates the functionality from both.