Re: openoffice & xywrite?

[Russ Urquhart russurquhart1@xxxxxxxx]

On Aug 11, 2007, at 1:09 AM, Harmon Seaver wrote:
>   So -- I've googled all day and searched the openoffice site and
> forums extensively, but to no avail. Anybody here got any ideas? I
> can,
> I guess, just save both as text files, but in long documents, I'm
> probably going to end up with trashed formatting, etc, and have to
> do a
> lot of work over again.
I would want to agree with Robert's suggested approach. (Wouldn't
want to make him mad by not agreeing! :) )
I would only add some ideas that i used. About two years ago or so, i
wanted to be able to write in Xywrite and then take the text, with
some minimal formatting, character styles and paragraph styles
assigned, into Framemaker, the desktop publishing package we were using.
I too have tried to use numerous translation products and they all
seemed to fail on some aspect of the document that was important to
me at the time. They were never perfect and always required some
touchup. With this past experience, and with also being tasked with
looking at the advantages of using XML for our small group, I came up
with an idea. I put together a simple intermediate tagging format and
used that for tagging character styles, and paragraph styles for the
Framemaker stylesheet that was going to be applied to the text. (The
idea was to keep the format simple, so it could be parsed easily, and
also used if i happened to be writing something in a text editor or
something other than Xywrite.)
I then wrote a script to convert this intermediate format to the
Framemaker MIF format, which has very XML style to it, with the
verbosity of Postscript. You situation of needing to go to XML
actually might be a little easier. I would suggest doing some test
text in OpenOffice and then look at the XML it generates and then
tailor a script to put similar XML formatting around your text.
With the minimal markup you can still write what you want, but still
have a lot of formatting capabilities available when you need them.
When you go back from XML to Xywrite, parsing the XML can be as
difficult as you want. In my case i didn't go that direction as
usually by the time i had converted the text, it was in a final form.
The intermediate format also came in handy when i needed to convert
text from another application and carry that over into Framemaker. I
wrote a script to parse and take the text from this application and
convert it to my intermediate format. I could then run the first
script and convert the intermediate text into Framemaker.

Hope this helps!

Good luck!

Russ