--On Wednesday, 23 November, 2005 13:54 -0800 Joe Touch
<touch@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> To others:
>
> I'm seeking help with two aspects of this template:
>
> a) being able to generate ASCII printer output from Macs and
> under OpenOffice
> the current template has been tested only under
> Office XP with the "Generic / Text Only" print driver
>
> b) being able to generate XML output
> the current version can print to any printer,
> or output HTML,
> and can output ASCII text as above,
> but needs to be augmented to dump XML
>
> (NOTE: I'm still unconvinced of the utility of this
> exercise; at the end of the day, most of what I need
> a document to do I get out of .txt, .html, and .doc,
> including access to databases of BibTex references
> via EndNote)
>
> If any of you would like to help, drop me an email (ASCII,
> please ;-)
Joe,
Getting a simulation of XML out can be done simply by doing a
"save as" from the version of Word included in Office
Professional 2003. The difficulty is that it is
XML-used-as-format-markup, not XML-as-generic markup, and
"MS-XML" at that (i.e., if there is a defined DTD or Schema, it
appears to be only available to and manipulable by their
proprietary tools (and license-prohibited against reverse
engineering).
I tried to do that conversion with a version of RFC2821bis that
was composed using the RFC3285 template plus a few corrections/
twitches suggested by colleagues at Microsoft for better Office
2003 compatibility. I can show pictures of the dents made in
the nearest brick wall by my head, a problem that was aggravated
by the fact that introducing either the 3285 template or yours
into my environment screws up the normal Word working
environment, which I need to keep pretty standard.
RFC2821bis was finally converted to rfc2xml format on a
one-time, no going back, basis by Tony Hanson. I'm not sure of
exactly what he did, and suspect it involved some hand tuning,
but I at least ended up with something I can work with, get into
I-D form, and revise as I go along. The difficulty, of course,
is that I lost all of the finely-tuned Word change tracking and
comment stuff which was why I used Word in the first place: Tony
converted the comments to XML comments, but that just isn't the
same thing.
Microsoft announced yesterday that Word 12 (Office 2006?) will
have an XML output/ input/ archival format that they are going
to make public and submit to ECMA for standardization. Whether
that will actually be any better or is just a ploy to keep a few
states (including Massachusetts) from standardizing on OpenDoc
is something that we won't know until the next version of Office
and the draft spec actually appear.
john
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