Re: A modest proposal

["Bruce D'Arcus" <darcusb@muohio.edu>]

John Culleton wrote:

>As an old programmer let me tell you, conversion seldom works. Just take
>the specs and write from scratch in the new language.  The basic 
mechanisms
>of Context are too different for useful transliteration from all that 
other 
>stuff. If you could reduce the MSWord stuff tho XML there might be some 
>hope.  But it would still be ugly Context at the end of the stream.

I've been thinking about this issue quite a bit.  I currently use 
Word/Endnote for serious academic work.  Since I am in the social 
sciences, I need to be able to produce Word or rtf docs that perfectly 
preserve two things: the structure of the document (for me section 
headings, footnotes, text, etc.) and complex bibliographic formatting 
specific to different journals.  I have yet to figure out how to do 
both of these at the same time in the TeX world, which is why I have 
yet to switch.  

While it is feasible to map much of a Word document onto the structures 
of LaTeX/ConTeXt and it would be nice if such a script was available, I 
am more concerned with going the other way: taking a ConTeXt document 
(or even better, the PDF produced with it) and converting to rtf (or 
maybe html; or xml I guess, since supposedly Word can read xml docs)...

Bruce