Re: ConLang Journal

En réponse à Tim May <butsuri@...>:

>
> As I understand it, Christophe wants to do the thing in LaTeX, and RTF
> is okay because it can be converted to LaTeX automatically.  Possibly
> there are utilities which perform a similar conversion from HTML - I
> know that the reverse exists.
>
I have one now (well, it's actually a subset of the WordPerfect-to-LaTeX
converter, and is pretty limited, but according to the author works better than
the Perl script HTML2LaTeX).

> The problem with HTML, I'm guessing, is that it's not really designed
> for formatting printed materials, wheras LaTeX is (I'm not competant
> with either, myself, so I can't go into much more detail).
>
True. But both are document formatting languages, so the translation is not
*that* difficult (and is even easier in HTML->LaTeX direction since LaTeX can
do many more things than HTMl does. The only problem is the hyperlinks. I have
to check how it handles internal hyperlinks - I hope it transforms them into
cross-references - and I wonder what it does with external hyperlinks. If it
works like the Perl script, it transforms them into a bibliography). The most
difficult conversions come from wordprocessors that allow to make unstructured
files (a thing that LaTeX just *cannot* do, but in our case we don't want
unstructured files :)) ), like Word and WordPerfect, as well as the RTF format.
But the converters I have for them are quite good AFAIK. I've come across a
plain text to LaTeX converter, but I have to look for it again. IIRC, it needs
the plain text file to be structured anyway. If there are people interested in
sending submissions in plain text, I'll look more closely at it.

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.