David Masover
4/16/2009 5:01:00 PM
On Wednesday 15 April 2009 22:25:08 Mohit Sindhwani wrote:
> David Masover wrote:
> > I was suggesting that you rip open Textile, or write your own Textile
> > parser, or even work with the Textile-generated HTML, and write a script
> > that generates an ODT.
>
> Ya! I think I may need to look at ripping open the parser and adding
> Word (or ODT) to the parser (if I remain stubborn enough to do this). I
> am less keen to do this... yet!
Now that I think of it, it's probably simpler to read the Textile-generated
HTML. But either way, you'll have to deal with an office format, which isn't
going to be fun.
> I don't care about styles being generated from my CSS. I'm happy enough
> if the document retains the semantics of being different types of
> sections. I don't mind creating the styles again in the Word/ ODF
> software.
In that case, it's probably not too difficult. Still harder than adding a print
mode to CSS, but feasible.
I'll strongly suggest ODF if you go that route, even if you're targeting word,
unless you have a _very_ good Word library. The reason is simple: Last I
checked, the ODF spec is 600 pages. The Microsoft OpenXML spec is 6000 pages,
and is incomplete. On a more subjective level, ODF XML is actually reasonably
readable, while OpenXML is not. I'd much rather let a tool like OpenOffice, or
the OpenDocument plugin for Word, handle that for me, rather than trying to
deal with OpenXML.
> That last quote is fantastic! I'm actually kind of writing a book.
[snip]
> If I could get to Word, it would open up other applications
> for me.
Maybe. It's possible Word does something CSS doesn't, here.
What I'm suggesting is that plain old HTML/CSS will probably give you what you
need for styling, even for print media, without having to use a word
processor. If you can do it with CSS, it will be easier, more portable, and
likely more future-proof than trying to do it with a word processor.