On Dec 8, 2011, at 4:26 PM, Brian Knittel wrote:
My experience is that both import and export tools do
a decent job of
getting raw text in and out. Formatting, styling, graphics, equations,
cross references and outline numbering schemes? Not so much. But this
is where the investment in a document lies. Text is cheap. One way of
converting legacy formats is to have printed pages retyped in China or
India at under a dollar a page. (This is a real industry.) But
formatting is really expensive. Complex documents with drawings, math
or tables can cost a business $25 to 100 a page, or more, to have
reworked by skilled clerical or technical staff.
Hah, no kidding. My dad's been doing this for well over a decade for a small
linguistic journal (the Journal of Indo-European Studies). Good money to be made in that,
especially for a linguistic journal that uses all sorts of weird phonetic markings for
long-dead languages. He's even modified a font to add appropriate markings to the
character set (long before Unicode was popular).
- Dave