Re: commercial xyW2html converters

["..." adpf@xxxxxxxx]

≪While your waiting for Anne (or if you have a big software budget) I
just installed the new Wordport for Windows version 7.1 and recommend it.
Low and behold, among its new features is an eeasy and so far effective
xyrite (v. 3 and v. 4--including XYW) conversion to HTML.≫ --Allan Needell

I've wondered idly how converters like Adobe File Utilities (ex-w4w) know
what xyCode constitutes an anchor? What fonts are 
, , and
? Allan, your praise for Wordport makes me doubly curious. I'm not
trying to be contentious. I'm genuinely curious.

Mastersoft filters always knocked me out with their faithful translation
from one word processor to another. But the ultimate purpose of all word
processors is to print precisely to media of a given size, and everything
in them is directed to this end, so they all have a lot in common.

HTML is deliberately as fuzzy as possible as regards display in order to
be rendered on any kind of monitor. So little of it deals with cosmetics
that translating html to word processor, presumably for printing, would
be pretty much a matter of translating all codes that browsers render
similarly to one format and stripping tags meaningless to a word
processor--so much the better if the word processor has some spreadsheet
capability so it can handle s.

Word processor-to-HTML is a different story. Word processors have no
counterpart to most of what constitutes html, tags like  and
 that are meaningful to indexers. How does a converter know how
to translate embedded commands to tags beyond the obvious like {mdbo} ->
 or  and {mdit} / {mdbr} ->  or ? How does a converter
distinguish between  and  and ? If it translates, say, {ip}
to 
, what does it translate to 
 or 
 or 
? If the
user must spell out all tags except the cosmetic, what kind of conversion
is that? If not, how not? 	--a a/k/a annie (who is not now and never has
been named Anne or Ann ;) )

============================= adpFisher  nyc