Re: ConTeXt to RTF Conversion

[Mojca Miklavec <mojca.miklavec.lists@gmail.com>]

Louis F.Springer wrote:
> What are the options for conversion from ConTeXt to other formats, if  
> any? I'm particularly interested in rtf and/or html.

The main problem is: PDF is extremely complex format (and Hans tries to 
explore almost every single capability of it) and you can't grant a good 
conversion for obscure documents. You can't get html out of the box, but 
there are some options depending on what your documents look like, what 
effort are you ready to invest and what quality of HTML/RTF you expect.

(I can't imagine a tool which would satisfactory convert the ConTeXt 
manuals into HTML without manual intervention.)

1. The best quality can be achieved if you prepare all your stuff in XML 
and then write both a stylesheet for conversion into HTML and "a couple" 
of ConTeXt definitions to handle formating for output in PDF documents. 
I never did that (I consider it too complex and time consuming), but if 
you're ready to go that way and sacrifice some time, there are some 
people on the list who can help you.

2. exTeX is going to natively support HTML output. The question is when 
a stable version is going to appear and if ConTeXt will ever support it 
/ if they will support ConTeXt. (not a satisfactory answer yet)

3. latex2html, latex2word, tth - like

No, no such tool yet and I doubt that anyone is going to write it soon.

4. PDF -> HTML / PDF -> RTF conversion

Currently the best possibility if you have simple documents, you don't 
want to spend too much time on it and you don't mind too much about high 
quality of the produced HTML/RTF.

I often use pdftotext and then manually reformat everything (not for my 
own documents however), but I was impressed by the quality of what ABBYY 
PDF Transformer was able to do with sample documents that I saw (it 
converts a table in PDF into a table in Word, preserves images and page 
layout, ...).

About the accents that Idris mentioned: As long as the accented 
characters aren't faked, there is a way to get them out of PDF.

Mojca