Re: Word to plain text: please help me test my web based converter

Denni wrote:
*Sigh*, I miss the good old typewriter and red pen! Weren't things--
erm--_easier_ back then?

Currently I'm producing TeX files with WinEdt (and I don't even want
to think about having them edited electronically!)

Of course, it turns out that everybody wants to receive either rtf
files or plain text (those that want doc, I tell that word will open
rtf files). I used to have a little program that converted pdf to rtf,
but it stopped working after one conversion.

Now, with short stories, I just cut and paste into WordPad and convert
everything manually. With the novel, I'll print and send out the
physical pdf document to my writers' group, so that people can
scribble on it with their red pens...

I use tex (pdflatex) for my fiction, too, but I don't write the tex
code directly in the editor. I just write the story in a format that's
essentially plain text (with certain ways of marking italics and scene
breaks), and then feed that into a script that converts it to other
formats, such as tex source code. When I need to make an rtf, I
have a different script that converts my plain text to rtf. If you're
interested, I'd be happy to send you my code. It's written in perl,
to run on linux, but I think it should probably run pretty much
without modification on Windows, if you install Active State Perl.

Hey, everybody, this is an interesting discussion, but can't I
wheedle any Word users into testing my converter on their manuscripts?
You don't need to download or install any software. All you have to
do is go to http://tetragonsf.com/cgi-bin/convert_word1.cgi and
upload your Word document through the form interface. It will then
convert it to plain text, and pop it up for you in whatever text
editor (e.g., NotePad) your browser is configured to use for viewing
plain text files. Basically I'm just hoping to find out whether there
are major bugs I don't know about (e.g., chokes and dies on your Word
file) or formatting that isn't handled properly (e.g., XML tags
left in the output, <yech><phooey>bleah</phooey></yech>). I really
would be grateful for any feedback.
.

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