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At 11:30 AM 2/18/2003 -0500, Gavin Thomas Nicol wrote:
>The main thing is that if people use fonts (and hopefully styles)
>consistently, you can work with the data. There are reasonable, and improving
>conversion tools that can work with that as a basis.
When I write a document from scratch, I do. The first thing I ever did with
XML was to convert a Microsoft Word manual I had written, and after
automatic conversion, there were about a hundred errors in 400 pages.
But when I cut and paste from many sources into a single document, my
formats all get messed up. And if my XML depends on my formats, I have to
get the formatting right before I can convert cleanly. For me, it's easier
to just write it using text in the first place, but we're all angle-bracket
geeks here. Most authors don't think like we do.
FWIW, after insisting that I use Microsoft Word, a publisher is also
telling me I have to make sure, by hand, that I am following all the
guidelines that an XML editor would have enforced for me....and I've done a
*lot* of cutting and pasting to create this document from various other
things I had written....
Jonathan
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