🚀 go-pugleaf

From: Chuck.Phillips@FtCollins.NCR.COM (Chuck.Phillips)
>In LaTeX, you have something more like:
>
>\begin{document}
>\abstract{text text text...}
>\section
>text text text...
>\subsection
>text text\footnote{text text text...} text...
>\subsubsection
>text text text...
>...
>\end{document}

>Bearing all this in mind, would it be possible to construct "intelligent"
>converters from/to LaTeX to/from SGML that preserve the document's overall
>structure?  ...if _explicit_ formatting commands were simply ignored?

Yes, absolutely, you could probably write most of it as a little Perl
or similar high-level script.

Heck, you could probably write it in TeX, just write replacement
macros that expand themselves to the corresponding SGML string, Tex
will just think that's the output you wanted (well, I suppose it wants
to put out a dvi file, this would be easier in nroff, but you could
probably put all the ASCII/SGML out to the error file and throw away
the dvi file, something like that...)

There wouldn't be a heckuva lot more going on than just picking up the
backslashes and curly braces and changing them to angle-brackets
unless you were trying to conform to a particularly bad fit of a DTD:

	\abstract{text text text}	->	<abstract text text text>
	\section			->	<section>
	\subsection			->	<subsection>

and so on. I suppose someone will now point out that you could
probably define the SGML delimitors in the header to backslash and
none and be done with it..

The only possible problem might be that most DTD's have a notion of
ending an object eg, </section>. But I'd imagine you could just build
a list of LaTeX objects which are presumed to end any preceding
objects of a class and just use that. Note that SGML does not
*require* these end markers, but it's common.
-- 
        -Barry Shein

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