Re: openoffice & xywrite?

[Russ Urquhart russurquhart1@xxxxxxxx]

Hi Robert,


On Aug 11, 2007, at 10:56 PM, Robert Holmgren wrote:
** Reply to message from Russ Urquhart
 on Sat, 11 Aug 2007 16:25:51 -0500

Very interesting, Russ. Could you enlarge a bit on the
simple intermediate tagging format
that you devised? How that worked, specifically?
The format was based on how i remember the old Ventura software
tagged their text files.
I used the target paragraph format name, preceeded by an '@', and
followed by the '='. So for ListItem element, i would write that in
Xy as:
@ListItem = Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of
their country.
The predominant or Body/Main paragraph format would be applied by
default if no tag is found.
For Character Styles I tried to use a sequence of characters that
probably wouldn't occur naturally in my text. I think i ended up
using something like, <~` to prefix any text and `~> appended to the
end to denote a character style, so, to apply the Heavy character
style to some text:
@ListItem = Now is the time for all <~`@heavy = good`~> men to come
to the aid of their country.
You can use whatever you want, the idea for me was that all the
converts i found really didn't work as well as i needed. (I also
usually only had a couple formatting issues i was concerned about and
so i could make sure they were addressed in my script.)
When you go back from XML to Xywrite, parsing the XML can be as
difficult as you want.

Meaning ... what? Doesn't the XML determine the difficulty?
Depending on the dtd of the document you are trying to parse or
create, there can be a LOT of information that you may not want to
read or have to read, or information that you do not know at document
creation time. Let me give an example, as I was writing text in Xy
for passing through my script to Framemaker, I didn't necessarily
know if the given text needed to start on a new page or not, so i
wouldn't set the pagebreak attribute in the text file. Now,
conversely, the pagebreak attribute, or maybe some target attributes,
may not have much relevance to the Xy writing session I'm currently in.
So what i meant was, depending on the dtd, and what level of info you
wanted to deal with, any scripts and their complexity grows
accordingly. It's your call!

Hope that helps!

Russ