rendering-and-converting.md

title	description	published	date	tags	editor	dateCreated
Rendering and converting		true	2021-12-09 03:39:05 UTC		markdown	2021-09-02 02:05:52 UTC

It is common for authors to render (convert) their documents into a different format to make them easier to read, or to convert to another format for use in another tool.

Rendering RFCXML into other formats

There are three main ways to render RFCXML:

1. Use the Author Tools web service. This is the easiest way as it does not require you to install anything.
2. Install xml2rfc and run it directly.
3. Use rfcxml.xslt with any XSLT processor (including those embedded in web browsers). This allows those using XML editors to directly render output from that editor and in some editors, to see the results in real time. It also allows viewing the document directly in a browser without a prior conversion step.

The following table shows the output formats supported by each tool.

| Tool | Supported output formats ||||||||

	Plaintext	HTML	HTMLised1	PDF	EPUB	Nroff	DOCX
Author Tools	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No
xml2rfc	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes2	No
rfcxml.xslt	No	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	No	No
xml2docx	No	No	No	No	No	No	Yes

Notes: ¹ HTMLised is the plaintext version with an HTML wrapper and the references and table of contents turned into links. ² nroff output is only supported for RFCXML v2 input files.

Rendering plaintext into other formats

There are three main ways to render plaintext:

1. Use the Author Tools web service. This takes I-Ds in a number of formats, including Markdown, and directly renders an output document.
2. Install xml2rfc and run directly
3. Install id2xml and use that to convert your plaintext to RFCXML and then follow the instructions for rendering RFCXML above

Rendering other formats

If you want to convert from a different source format then you should first convert to RFCXML or plaintext and follow the instructions above.