[xsl] Advice on dictionary conversion

[Ciarán Ó Duibhín <ciaran@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I wish to convert a bilingual dictionary from MS-Word format to 
"properly"-tagged XML, and I hope I may ask for some comment on the 
feasibility of this, using XSLT or otherwise.

First I found several programs which automatically convert the Word files to 
FO:XSL, either from .doc or .rtf.  My preferred one of those I examined is 
the Novosoft converter (http://www.rtf-to-xml.com/).  I painlessly converted 
the entire letter D using their online interface.

Now I have to replace the presentational tags by tags like <HEADWORD>, 
<EXPLANATION>, <EXAMPLE> etc.  I tried doing this manually, but it is not 
practical.  Besides, I have to start from scratch again for each new letter 
of the alphabet.  I have zero experience of XSLT, but it seemed that an XSLT 
program might be what was needed.  I started with XRay2 (really nice for a 
beginner in some ways) and have now moved on to the Essential XML Editor 
with Saxon.  But progress has been minimal.

The main problem is my ignorance of XSLT, although I am an experienced 
general programmer.  A particular difficulty is that "italics" (for example) 
might be used for more than one part of the dictionary entry.  However the 
choice of which tag to replace it with might well be decided by the target 
DTD (if I were to formulate it).  Is this an example of what people 
sometimes refer to on this list as "schema-aware XSLT"?  If so, I have no 
idea how to make my XSLT schema-aware.

Another problem is that the dictionary contains quite a few "mistakes" which 
are all but invisible in Word, eg. a single space might be inadvertently 
bolded in an unbold field.  This sort of thing is faithfully copied by a 
converter and complicates the starting XML unnecessarily, of course.

I would be grateful for advice as to how best to proceed.  I took on this 
job as a favour, hoping it would help me to learn something of these 
technologies, but it seems now there is too much to learn on one's own in 
any reasonable short space of time (XSLT is not for amateurs :-(.  Perhaps I 
should advise to have the job done professionally.  Unless there is 
something I am missing...

On a related matter, I have recently discovered LIFT as a particular XML 
format for lexicographical work (http://code.google.com/p/lift-standard/) 
Any experience of that as a target format for XSLT would also be of 
interest.

Thanks,
Ciaran S Duibhmn.