From: David Masover Date: 2009-04-17T02:01:20+09:00 Subject: Re: TexTile to Word Document 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.