Thank you so much, Christopher, for your detailed answer!

===== Original Message From Christopher Creutzig ===== Idris Samawi Hamid wrote:

...

Would it be possible to define an xml format for the journal so that I could more easily process both ConTeXt/LaTeX articles as well as the docs and rtfs I generally receive? Is this more work than it's worth? It's a humanities journal, so little-to-no math.

If your most pressing problem is the variety of data formats you receive articles in, then no, xml won't help. You'd still need some way of transforming the articles to the format of your choice. That being said, XML may be a very good intermediate step from Word or rtf to ConTeXt, if only because OpenOffice has pretty advanced import filters and stores its data in a straightforward xml format that should be easy to transform, assuming you start with a sufficiently rich set of predefined formats and somehow get people to either use them (fat chance, I know)

fat chance, perhaps, but maybe...(see below)

or have them be sufficiently different that you can automatically or at least semi-automatically classify the author's formatting to your presets. In really simple cases (e.g., pure prose) you may get away with accepting HTML and converting that.

Paul Tremblay's pages seem very useful in this regard: http://getfo.sourceforge.net/context_xml/contents.html Question: Is it possible to design a doc or rtf template that Open Office can convert to a sane, consistent xml format? If the Tremblay approach is rich enough, that would solve a lot of problems! Here is my idea: 1. Give each author a doc/rtf template for formatting their article; 2. Use OpenOffice to convert to xml; 3. Use the Tremblay method (have not tried it yet) to process this in Context. Question: Does the entire journal have to be in programmed in xml or can ConTeXt process xml locally? For example, I may have my own article done in COnTeXt mixed with other articles done in rtf=>xml. Any other advice (and/or pitfalls to watch for) would be appreciated. This sounds very promising! Best Idris ============================ Professor Idris Samawi Hamid Department of Philosophy Colorado State University Fort Collins, CO 80523