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Subject:Re: SGML to MS Word Conversion (#312845) From:Sarah Lee Bihlmayer <sarahlee -at- CONTENTMANAGE -dot- COM> Date:Wed, 28 Aug 1996 16:43:18 -0700
Bill Burns writes:
>Okay, I'm confused. I've been doing research on SGML for seveal months, and I
>had the impression that this translation was a simple one. If the whole
point of
>SGML is to provide one source and multiple output, and you can translate SGML
>into other proprietary formats, why couldn't you translate it into Word? As I
>understand, the Rainbow DTD allows just this sort of translation
capability, and
>it's a public domain DTD.
That's true...however, the translation capability is there _only_ when the
Rainbow DTD is used in unmodified form. Although there's growing interest
in this DTD, it isn't necessarily the DTD that every SGML user works with.
My statements about translation apply to SGML applied generically...and the
vast majority of organizations that I've worked with have found that prefab
DTDs (including the Rainbow) don't fit their document needs and asked me to
analyze their information and write a customized DTD for their own use. In
this case, there wouldn't be a plug-and-play conversion tool available, and
that's what I meant by my original statements.
>Here's another possible workaround. Numerous applications are designed to
>created SGML on Word. If you can open the file in an SGML editor running on top
>of Word (TagWizard by NICE Technologies), you may also be able to save to a
Word
>file. If you have a template in place that uses the same tags and defines the
>layout accordingly, you should be able to make the conversion with few
problems.
Once again, this is a DTD-specific solution. In order to use TagWizard, you
need access to the DTD for the documents to be converted. It doesn't
convert all SGML documents regardless of their tagging parameters.
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