Re: Write once layout everwhere (?)

["John R. Culleton" <john@wexfordpress.com>]

On Sunday 10 June 2007 23:49, Aditya Mahajan wrote:
> On Sun, 10 Jun 2007, Pepe Barbe wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > I have used ConTeXt in the past and I have been very pleased with
> > it and the results obtained, much more than LaTeX.
> >
> > Now I am looking into a solution that would allow me to layout
> > the content ConTeXt and in other formats that ConTeXt does not
> > (Forgive my ignorance, if I am wrong) output, like HTML, Plain
> > Text, or RTF (Those are the formats that I can think of that are
> > interesting to me currently).
> >
I don't think it is possible to come up with an "universal elixir" 
that does any format from source and is efficient to use. Plain text 
is the exchange medium I use.  XML is too cumbersome to code by hand. 
Therefore I have solutions for specific situations. For example when 
a customer presents me with a non-fiction document already laid out 
in MSWord, I first save it as rtf. Then I run it through the program 
rtf2latex2e. This gives me an executable LaTeX file, with all the 
font changes etc. preserved. The I edit it in Gvim, using mass 
changes to convert LaTeX tags to an equivalent Context format. Some, 
like all the begin/end tags I just delete en masse. 

It is easy to go from the output of Context to plain text.  There are 
plenty of pdf to ascii converters in GhostScript and PSUtils etc.   
The only big problem comes when there are columns involved. 
In that situation cut and paste from a pdf viewer window to an editor 
window can be helpful.


-- 
John Culleton
Able Indexing and Typesetting
Precision typesetting (tm) at reasonable cost.
Satisfaction guaranteed. 
http://wexfordpress.com

___________________________________________________________________________________
If your question is of interest to others as well, please add an entry to the Wiki!

maillist : ntg-context@ntg.nl / http://www.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/ntg-context
webpage  : http://www.pragma-ade.nl / http://tex.aanhet.net
archive  : https://foundry.supelec.fr/projects/contextrev/
wiki     : http://contextgarden.net
___________________________________________________________________________________