Section 5.3.5.3.3. Some general comments

Although ciftex is available for public use and redistribution within the academic community, it is clearly of most interest to users who need to generate typeset representations of the contents of CIFs. Nevertheless, some elements of its design are relevant to other applications that perform on-the-fly file transformations on a strictly syntactic basis.

First, the functionality is very simple, essentially tokenizing the input data stream and exchanging tokens for replacement text as directed. An immediate consequence of this is the need for additional utilities to manipulate the input file if, for example, the data need to be presented in a particular order. In the journals production process, QUASAR is used to reorder an input file before passing it to ciftex.

Second, the replacement text should be externalized as much as possible. The use of map and format files means that the same basic program can be used for formatting according to any set of typographic rules; only the ancillary files need to be modified. In the current version of ciftex, the program performs some replacements internally; an objective of further development is to remove this function from the program and to externalize it either in more sophisticated table lookup files or in separate methods modules.

Third, the concept of replacement should be abstracted as much as possible. The software was written initially with the objective of replacing data names with macros. Experience suggests that a generic transformation program could be written with the philosophy of replacing data names and data values by directives implemented before and after the occurrence of the data value, and as events upon its first, last and intervening occurrences. Such `directives' and `events' could be mapped to arbitrary replacement strings in any markup scheme, such as SGML, XML, HTML, , or commercial word-processing encodings.