For my own personal work I don't much care, but for nearly all the
clients I've taken on, even the non-payers, Microsoft Office or at least
word XP or 2000 is mandatory! They haven't much use for xml or any kind of
web handling.
People get such strange ideas too. One guy I did some work for last
year who has a small law firm with two attorneys and 2 associates uses
Office with a legal formatting add-on he bought, ( I don't recall the name
at the moment, but it's one of those "association" offers which are sold to
any number of business types by simply changing a title and a few options.
), and he's still after me to write a program that will allow him to create
templates of new forms and/or contracts as he writes them, save the
templates into his DB2 and then continue using it, printing and saving the
finished forms into a client section of his database. I've tried to explain
to him how easy all of this is to do without the need to wrote a special
application, and you would think a guy like this would be smart enough to
listen, but evidently he saw or heard about a program written specifically
for this that he wants me to mimic and naturally he doesn't know it's name
either! <g> Actually there's quite a bit more he wants included but that's
the basic idea. I know I could script something together for him using Word
basic and perhaps a small client app for the db side of things, but he's
willing to pay and so I figure it'll be an interesting challenge to put it
all together under one exe.
from Robert Meek dba Tangentals Design CCopyright 2006
"When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion
that the gift of Fantasy has meant more to me then my talent for absorbing
positive knowledge!"
Albert Einstein
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
On Behalf Of Rob Kennedy
Sent: Saturday, February 11, 2006 1:58 AM
To: Delphi-Talk Discussion List
Subject: Re: Converting word help to html
Robert Meek wrote:
> By any chance do you know of that's the way the Delphi exe version
> of "Still Casting Shadows" is handled? ( In case you don't know what this
> is see my post today on Delphi-talk with that Subject line )
I couldn't find any Delphi or Delphi-Talk messages with the subject line
"Still Casting Shadows"; are you talking about the book by Blackbird
Crow Raven, Code Central item 23106? If not, then please ignore large
portions of this message.
> The reason I ask is that I only found out about this piece of work
> yesterday myself, and not only was I quite amazed at how well it had been
> written but also in the document itself! I've always wanted to try doing
> something like this myself, ( not writing a book, of course ), and in such
a
> way that I could employ MS Word as my master editor from which I could
then
> post to the Web, a blog, a help file, or even as an integral part of a
> Delphi app.
"Still Casting Shadows" isn't an integral part of anything. The program
is nothing more than something that launches Acrobat Reader (or whatever
your preferred PDF viewer is).
If you want a PDF of your Word document, then simply direct Word to
print to a PDF print driver. Adobe sells one. You can get another in
connection with Ghostscript. (Adobe's is convenient because it also adds
a "PDF" button to the tool bar.)
> There used to be some good freeware add-ons for MS word that at the
> very least allowed one to format what you wrote for screenplays and/or
html
> docs, but I haven't come across any for the more recent versions. "Still
> Casting Shadows" looks and reads so nicely that I now know for sure that
> this is the right way to go provided it doesn't involve extra costs.
"Still Casting Shadows" was made using Open Office 2. Open Office can
create PDFs directly.
Whatever was used, preparing the book couldn't have been too difficult.
Page breaks, header styles, and page numbers are all the features it
appears to use. As long as you're familiar with style sheets, you can
make your document look however you want -- screenplays, biographies,
technical manuals, etc. The "SCS" document isn't quite the quality that
TeX would produce, though.
If you're going to be processing your text, Word is _not_ the format to
start with. (And unless you require Word documents, Word isn't the
format to end with, either!) Open Office uses an XML format, so anyone
ambitious enough can transform it to the desired output with XSLT. There
are TeX-to-HTML converters out there. Another base format to consider is
DocBook.
--
Rob
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