RE: [NTG-context] DOC/RTF to ConTeXt via XML

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 ===== 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