Hi Christopher, Duncan, Hans, and Adam,
Thank you so much for your detailed comments and suggestions. Again, I'm
completely new to xml and feel like a fish out of water. OTOH I use sooo much
time just manually extracting text (with innumerable transliteration
diacritics) and then copying-pasting to WinEDT that I am willing to explore
the xml approach if it can be made sane enough...
>===== Original Message From Christopher Creutzig <christopher(a)creutzig.de>
=====
>Duncan Hothersall wrote:
>> Well, XSLT seems to have been designed, and certainly tends to be
>> implemented, as a tool for simple transformations of small XML chunks.
>
> No, xslt is a tool for arbitrary xml -> xml conversions (and a little
>more than that).
Ok, you guys have lost me now-) Maybe the best thing to do is try something
practical: take an average word article and see what's involved in converting
it to ConTeXt. From what I gather so far the process goes something like
doc => rtf
rtf => OO.o
OO.o => xml
But here things get dicey because
\startHans
converting open office xml is not always easy; stay away from tab's and use
high level constructs as much as possible
\stopHans
Question: Will a proper doc (or OO.o) template solve this problem or is this a
post-OO.o-processing problem no matter what I do beforehand?
>From this discussion it seems that I (as an xml ignoramous) would be better
off converting to ConTeXt code rather than processing pure xml blocks (but
maybe I'm wrong).
Once I get a sane xml file (this seems to be the biggest problem) what is the
best tool to convert this to ConTeXt?
We are all extremely busy, of course, but if anyone finds this interesting I
can send a sample doc article from my journal. Maybe we can do a MyWay or
something to document this process for ourselves and others, as well as find
the most practical approach to creating a sane workflow. Besides, this kind of
project seems to be exactly the kind of thing to illustrate the full power of
ConTeXt.
This is a mid-term project so no urgency (I'll keep copying and pasting for
now->)
Thanks again you all for your advice.
Best
Idris
============================
Professor Idris Samawi Hamid
Department of Philosophy
Colorado State University
Fort Collins, CO 80523