Re: DOCBOOK: converting to docbook

Hello DocBook-heads,
	The following possibility may have already been explored on 
this list without me knowing since I've only been on it a few months, 
but I'll throw it out there anyway. If not, I'd appreciate your 
scrutiny...

At 9:37 AM -0700 8/13/02, Bob Stayton wrote:
>On Tue, Aug 13, 2002 at 02:26:24AM -0700, jonathon wrote:
>  >
>>	I have roughly 10 000 documents of various formats
>>	[ plain ASCII, TeeX, DocBook, HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.0
>>	word, wordperfect, pdf and a couple of others. ]
>>
>>	Can anybody point me to something that will easilly convert
>>	these to docbook, and preserve some/most of their current
>  >	formatting?
>
>[snip]
>
>For your PDF documents, I'd look for the source document
>that generated the PDF.  It is tough (impossible?)
>to convert PDF.

There is this beta "SaveAsXML" plug-in for Adobe Acrobat 5 that has 
customizable mapping tables. If you produce a _tagged_ PDF (e.g. 
product of InDesign, MS Office PDFmaker (win only)), SaveAsXML will 
convert it to a generic XML doc mapping block styles to XML tags. If 
you use DocBook tag names for your blocks, then you will get a 
primitive form of DocBook, or what I'm calling preDocBook. I 
customized the supplied XML table to pick up Bold and convert it to 
<emphasis> and Italic to <citetitle>. I've attached this table if 
anyone want to try it out.

The main advantage I can see in this strategy is that you bypass 
converting HTML tags to DocBook and all the decisions that are 
associated. (e.g. Is H1 a <sect1> or <chapter>?). Also, you can 
predesignate your blocks in the authoring application.

Feedback?
Marc Brierley

link to SaveAsXML plug-in:
http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/89a6.htm
-- 


**************************************
Stanford Academic Computing Publications
Meyer Library 260
560 Escondido Mall
Stanford University
Stanford, CA   94305-3093
(650) 725-6883 voice
(650) 725-8495 fax