From: Mohit Sindhwani <mo_mail@...>
Date: 2009-04-16T12:25:08+09:00
Subject: Re: TexTile to Word Document

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!

> I was mostly suggesting this to discourage you from trying that approach. 
> There isn't a Textile-specific way of doing this, to my knowledge, and there 
> wouldn't likely be a good, generic way of doing it with HTML -- at best, you 
> could have something take a reference to a CSS class and replace it with a 
> reference to a given ODF (or Word) style, but you'd probably have to recreate 
> those styles in the word processor -- I don't know of anything that can take 
> CSS and generate corresponding ODF (or Word) styles.
>   

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.  Even in my TexTile -> HTML journey, I have a set of styles 
that I include into the HTML so that it works together.  I expect that 
creating/ customizing the style would be a one-off effort - after that, 
it's in a template and when I create a new document, I would just apply 
the template to it!

>> The reason for wanting to get to Word... well, I do know CSS and use
>> that for the causal first print from what I write.  But I think Word (or
>> some other publishing software, not sure which one) would give me better
>> control over controlling the print output.
>>     
>
> CSS gives a fair amount of control. It's possible Word and OpenOffice provide 
> more, but not much.
>   

I need to see the links below!  I am aware of print style sheets and use 
that quite a bit for my websites (mostly hosted on Radiant).  But, I'm 
keen to generate some "office" documents from the musings on my Palm 
phone when I'm out (I find the Documents To Go software not so great.. 
and not so clean).

>> For example, including
>> page-wise headers and footers, and so on.
>>     
>
> A quick Google finds this:
>
> http://css-discuss.incutio.com/?page=PrintStylesheets
> http://css-discuss.incutio.com/?page=PrintingHeaders
> http://www.xefteri.com/articles/show.cfm?id=26
> http://www.alistapart.com/articles/boom
>
> ...and so on.
>
> A quote from that last article: "It is now possible, even feasible, to use 
> HTML as the document format for books."
>   

That last quote is fantastic!  I'm actually kind of writing a book.  But 
I'm not sure if I will complete it.  If I don't complete it, I hope to 
release the material on one of my websites.  That's why working in 
TexTile is so attractive.  It's already ready for the (Radiant) website 
if need be.  If I could get to Word, it would open up other applications 
for me.

Cheers,
Mohit.
4/16/2009 | 11:25 AM.