Your information is important. We can help you take care of it.
Millions of people produce billions of words a day between them.
How much of it reaches its target audience intact?
How much survives the year in a usable form?
Does it have the intended effect?
Is your business losing customers because they cannot actually read what you wrote? — in letters, in reports, in contracts, on Web pages, in documentation, in email, in white papers?
If any of these sound familiar, have look at the services we provide.
We are always pleased to discuss your requirements, even if they are not covered explicitly here. The contact page has our number and email address.
Document Type design (RNG/DTD/Schema) to guide the creation of structured documents;
Document management and workflow design;
Transformation of XML documents to [X]HTML and other dialects of XML, and to LATEX and other markup languages;
Implementation of business rules and exception-handling within transformations.
Document Class and Package design and management to implement the creation of document structures;
Document management and workflow design;
Formatting to publishers' specifications (books, journals, articles, reports, etc; see Publications below);
Typesetting from transformations from XML.
Courses run on client premises
Introduction to XML editing
XML Document Type design and management
Introduction to LATEX
LATEX for Publishing staff
LATEX Document Class and Package creation
Document creation
Copy-editing
Proofreading
Grammar-checking
Ireland is on GMT (UTC), one hour behind Central European, five hours ahead of Eastern, and eight hours ahead of Pacific time. We love to get your calls, but at 4am our time we're likely to be asleep.
The software and documents linked here are provided under the terms of the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA or the LATEX Project Public License (LPPL), as appropriate.
A Bourne shell script to convert simple data from XML to CSV using onsgmls and awk; look, Mom — no XSLT!
Details of accented letters and other symbols on Linux keyboards.
A programmatically derived decorative swelled rule generated in LATEX (so no repeated graphics required).
Shakespeare's 18th Sonnet in the original Klingon with TEI XML markup in Quenya (Elvish).
An autorun program to make your CD-ROMs start automatically under MS-Windows by opening index.html in the user's default browser or editor.
Bourne shell script using awk to create a recursive directory listing as an XML instance (comes with DTD).
The software and documents linked here are provided under the terms of the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA or the LATEX Project Public License (LPPL), as appropriate. The XML and LATEX documents incorporate between them all the informational links which were on our previous Links page.
Frequently-asked questions on XML and related technologies, with answers from experts in the field
This is a two-page sampler showing most of the typefaces (Type 1 and Type 3) which are available free from CTAN for any installation of LaTeX.
A 200-page introduction to typesetting with LaTeX designed for those with no previous experience. This is the fifth edition (an earlier edition was published by the TeX Users Group in TUGboat vol. 23 No. 2).
The revised 4-page A4 marketing brochure, as described and explained in the paper presented to the TUG Conference 2001 at the University of Delaware.
Typesetting, document structure, fonts, editing, automation, and typography (2016 is in Toronto, July 25–27).
The markup conference moved in 2013 from its long-time home in Montréal to Bethesda, MD (in 2016 it’s August 2–5). Essential for anyone involved in the markup business.
The XML training event, a week-long immersion in XSLT, XQuery, Publishing, Linked Data, and everything XML (for beginners as well as experts) at St Edmund Hall, Oxford (September 11–16, 2016)
How HTML was designed
The world's largest collection of Irish texts from c.650 to the Good Friday Agreement (all in TEI XML, and, incidentally, Ireland's and UCC's first web site)
This is a collection of quotations, some of which used to be on our front page. So many people asked for them we decided to collect them together and keep them. If you have any more to add, please mail them to us.
Amanda Lynn has very kindly translated them all into Belorussian on FatCow.
Textual Therapy is the new paradigm: massaging your boss's ego has been replaced by massaging her information.
The clue train stopped there four times a day for ten years and they never took delivery.
…persuading users that spreading fonts across
the page like peanut butter across hot toast is not the
route to typographic excellence. (posted
on
comp.fonts)
…XSL: Think like a tree, not like a chainsaw. (posted on the XSL mailing list)
Any man who would letter-space blackletter would shag sheep.
XML isn't about pointy brackets and arcane rules, it's about improving your bottom line by making your information work harder.
This computer networking thing will never take off…it's just a device to let operators chat to each other.
Lots of systems pretend that what you see is what you get, but unless you have a 1270dpi paper-white A4 screen, WYSIWYG is just a bare-faced lie. LATEX's screen preview is great, but its real forte is that it just sets type superlatively well, again and again. For the technologically aware, the payback can be immense.
The paperless office will arrive at about the same time as the paperless toilet.
The Silmaril web sites only collect personal information in the Contact form.
This information is only used to reply to you and is not stored.
No cookies are used on these sites.
Silmaril is a small consultancy based in Cork, Ireland, ideally placed for serving clients in both Europe and North America.
Our core activities centre on information handling, especially textual information. We work mainly with SGML and XML systems; information transfer from wordprocessor and DTP formats, including the reuse of legacy information; proofreading and markup validation; and publishing automation systems using XML, XSLT, and LATEX.
Our client list extends to the UK, Switzerland, Germany, and North America, and includes publishers, software vendors, multinational manufacturers, financial services companies, and local, national, and European government offices. Projects include programming and automation solutions, project management, training and education, quality control, and documentation systems.
We are always pleased to discuss your requirements, even if they are not covered explicitly here. The contact page has our number and email address.
