9 Dec
2011
9 Dec
'11
10:54 a.m.
On 9 Dec 2011 at 13:28, David Riley wrote:
On Dec 8, 2011, at 4:26 PM, Brian Knittel wrote:
I've wondered for a time if a better "universal" format than raw text
was plain old HTML 2.0. It's what people expect to see nowadays
and the tough job of rendering is left to a browser.
Some years ago, I wrote a WPS 1.0 to HTML conversion package that
produced some very nice-looking results, but never could get much
enthusiasm going.
So for now, I stay with RTF.
Some formats require an understading of the peripherals, rather than
the CPU unit. Displaywriter is one such that relies on the printer
to do the fancy formatting for much of the (EBCDIC) document.
--Chuck
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).