Hi Christopher, On Dec 11, 2003, at 11:16 AM, Christopher G. D. Tipper wrote:

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Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2003 01:27:34 +0100 From: Giuseppe Bilotta To: ntg-context@ntg.nl Subject: Re[2]: [NTG-context] ConTeXt Switcher? Reply-To: ntg-context@ntg.nl

Not that I see the purpose of using Word in the frist place. Any decent editor has enough macro power to do the same.

-- Giuseppe "Oblomov" Bilotta

You missed the point. You markup and style your document using Word styles, and then XML is a matter of search and replace. I am not interested in Word per se, but I find using emacs to insert markup during document creation gets in the way of my thought processes. This way I can push markup worries to the editorial stage.

People are fond of pointing out Words vices, and I wouldn't quibble with arguments about its stability, but it is about time OpenOffice and its ilk stopped resting on their laurels and started implementing some macro capability. I notice that AbiWord has a DocBook output format, but how well integrated this is I don't know.

On Micro$oft's part if they had some real competition a real market in third-party templates might arrive. As it stands I have a 50% solution that handles footnotes and lists, but re-distribution is hampered by the way Word handles its templates and virus worries. Theoretically I could do tables and limited image markup using the same techniques. Leveraging the visual layout tools of a word-processor makes so much sense I wonder at the mentality of people still struggling with text-editors. I have emacs set up on my machine, but it really looks like back to the future from my point of view. I use WinEdt when I'm booted into Windows.

btw you can use the same technique to generate native Context markup. It needs hand-editting, but as a rough draft, this works fine for me, and I don't have to re-invent the wheel every time I have a new document.

You're point is well taken. I once wrote a complete Windows Help system generator using Word Basic macros and nothing else. If fed correctly structured documents, the macros would mark up all topics for display, page browsing, cross references, context sensitivity and indexes. It would then call the compiler. It took about 40 minutes to markup and compile a help system equivalent to 400 pages of text, graphics and all, on 1993-era Windows machines. The macros could also clean the files and start over if major changes were needed in the text. It was a freebie and efficient alternative to RoboHelp. I have just lost too much work to Word-corrupt files and Word-crashed systems to continue with MS. TeXShop (Mac OS X) has never crashed or hung in 15 months of use. The files have never become corrupt. I am looking at Nisus, or perhaps the OS X native TextEdit, as visual editors for the reasons you applaud Word. They both write rtf natively. I'm also looking at TeX4ht with ConTeXt. For now, TeXShop, LaTeX and TeX4ht are more flexible and stable than Word. We'll see. :) Take care. BK