Hi all, One way or another, within the text of the .doc file I've written tags for the following:
* The whole heading hierarchy * Major (and all home grown) paragraph styles * Major (and all home grown) character styles * Lists, both numbered and unnumbered * Markers for graphics, summarizing what they are * Markers for tables, telling how many columns and what kind of header * Markers for boxes At this point I think I have a fighting chance of exporting to text, converting to LyX, and then doing the final patchups within LyX itself. Dirty? Yes. Ugly? Yes. Necessary? Yes. It turns out Mr. Always Use Styles didn't always use styles, and sometimes applied different styles for the same conceptual uses. This wasn't all the fault of the Steve Litt who existed in 1999 -- some of it was MS Word silliness. Without the LaTeX back end, I had to fine tune stuff to prevent page breaking and the like. Lists were sometimes special environments but sometimes Normal. In the past I've told people it's just fine to create mail order books in MS Word. After going through that document I no longer feel that way. MS Word has too many gotchas requiring fine tuning. It's not much better than OO Writer. WordPerfect 5.1 was another matter entirely. It was a professional product way beyond its time. However, the one book I have in WordPerfect 5.1 is 18 years old and I doubt there will be a second edition. Anyway, the work I did today convinced me that solving this programatically would have been futile, and it would have taken a long time to learn it was futile. Next week I'll try to convert my tagged-up text file to LyX, and then start the (massive) cleanup. Then I'll save to yet another file and begin making the changes that will result in the second edition. By the way, if I ever write a second edition of "Troubleshooting Techniques of the Successful Technologist", I'll need to convert all my uses of LyX color based "character styles" (Dekl Tsur's pre-characterstyle workaround) to modern character styles. That should be a laugh a minute :-) Thanks SteveT Steve Litt Recession Relief Package http://www.recession-relief.US
