🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <20186.2b362c76@ul.ie> , murraya@ul.ie writes:
>Can anybody give me details on an application to mark-up text from
ordinary
>ascii files 'automatically', using certain Rules  eg. two blank lines 
>indicates the begining of a paragraph. 

We have developed some tools with which to convert documents in different
word processing formats to hypermedia documents for on-line use. During
this process we use SGML as an intermediate format (as long as source
documents are not already in SGML).

The final hypermedia documents are in the format of Apple HyperCard
stacks and the conversion tools are also based on HyperCard. During the
next few months, we are going to program Microsoft Windows versions of
the same tools with Asymmetrix ToolBook. 

The idea of the conversion process is to read in the source document in
specific format, remove the format specific instructions from the text of
the source document and write the "clean" text into a target file. The
key point is that every time an instruction is removed from the source
text, a specific message is sent to a user defined converter. The
handlers for the conversion messages can be programmed with HyperTalk,
which is the interpreted programming language of HyperCard. The handlers
can map the removed instructions to whatever operations available in
HyperCard (e.g. to write SGML tags to the target file).

We have programmed converters for Ventura to SGML, RTF to SGML and SGML
to HyperCard. We have also planned to program a converter for ASCII to
SGML which would be based on specific characters in source text, such as
carriage returns, tabs, chapter numbers, etc.

The major user of the tools is a Finnish diesel engine manufacturer which
converts its service manuals for on-line use in ships and power stations.

We would be interested to have more cases where existing documents need
to be converted to hypermedia. For further information, you can reach me
at the addresses below.

-- Ilkka Priha

_______________________________________________________________________
. . ... ... Ilkka Priha                      Tel:      +358-0-456 6045
: :  :   :  Tech. Research Centre of Finland Fax:      +358-0-456 6027
 :   :   :  Lab for Information Processing
            Lehtisaarentie 2 A               Internet: priha@tik.vtt.fi
   T I K    SF-00340 Helsinki, FINLAND       BITNET:   priha@FINVTT
_______________________________________________________________________