processing RTF documents

[Ron Ross <ronross@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

I am presently doing a lot of collaborative work in translating and
revising documents, and although my sgml/dsssl system is fine for
producing well formatted documents, the process gets a little clunky
when I have to incorporate revisions from word processor files. Getting
partners and clients to switch to sgml/xml is not currently an option
(and switching back to the word processor for all my editing is an
option I'd like to avoid;-). I've downloaded Omnimark and Balise, which
both seem to offer means for converting and processing RTF files.
Eventually, I'll learn them both and exploit the advantages of each, but
my time is limitted now. So . . . I would appreciate any opinions on the
relative usefulness of Omnimark and Balise so that I may concentrate on
one or the other. Suggestions regarding alternative solutions would also
be welcome, of course (OpenJade transformations?).

What am I looking for? Well, conveting RTF documents to instances of my
own DTD would seem useful. Processes for "diffing" versions within the
same DTD would also be helpful.

One of the procedures I've come up with is to save the incoming file as
text (ANSI Win/iso-latin-1) and run Ediff through Emacs on chunks of
text at a time, or also converting the RTF output of my own version of
the document to text, running ediff on the whole file, then marking up
the result. It's all a bit time consuming, and error prone. (Should
Emacs users on the list have hints for configuring ediff with
appropriate regexps to ignore markup, that too, would be highly
welcome).

I hope this isn't too off topic. Thanks for your help,

Ron


-- 
Traductions Ron Ross Translations
ronross@xxxxxxxxx
"They were magical delusions, fireworks." -I. Murdoch


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