Re: docbook-tools-discuss: Re: I'm trying to set up docbook-tools...

["Edward C. Bailey" <ed at redhat dot com>]

>>>>> "Norm" == Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com> writes:
...
Norm> A little more discussion about how to convert from procedural markup
Norm> to structural markup is probably in order, but tools to do this are
Norm> very, very hard to write. This is the problem I call "dragging markup
Norm> up hill".  Look at the troff source for an (old) O'Reilly book (I
Norm> have :-), and you'll find that the same troff markup for "italic" is
Norm> used for all the things that are italic in print. (Quelle
Norm> surprise). But if you want to mark those things up semantically, you
Norm> have to distinguish between at least three or four different kinds of
Norm> italic things which is nearly impossible to do accurately.

We had the same problem going from LaTeX to DocBook; for every
\texttt{foo}, our script converted it to <TT?>foo</TT?>.  We then used
Emacs to do multiple query-replaces (ie, one to go from "TT?" to
"filename", one for "TT?" to "command", etc).  Once you got going, it was
possible to crank through a surprising volume of markup in a reasonable
amount of time.  Pretty mind-numbing, though... :-)  And I wouldn't
recommend taking this approach if you're a large company converting tons of
legacy content.

To really automate this kind of thing requires something on the order of a
HAL 9000 -- by looking at the few words surrounding the content in
question, a human being can make a pretty accurate assessment in a second
or so, but having a machine do the same thing is "Sir
Not-Appearing-in-This-Film", at least for the time being... :-)

                            Ed
-- 
Ed Bailey        Red Hat, Inc.          http://www.redhat.com/