On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 10:31 AM, Julio Rojas <[email protected]> wrote:
Making some text as Bold-Italic-Numbered-Size 14-Roman can be done in Lyx, > but it is much better to say that such text is in a Section environment, > because when changes on the document style are made, you only have to make > them once, and not throughout the document, at every instance of said > format. Finger painting, what you need, is not the way to go in Lyx/Latex. > It should be avoided like the plague. > > I hope you see the need for this approach. Regards. > Many years ago (a couple of decades at least) there was a paper presented at a SigDoc conference, I think it was, on some initial attempts to infer structural markup from procedural. This project must have been sometime in the late 1980s (certainly post 1986 and the ISO's publication of ISO 8879 SGML) and the early 1990s. I place it in that time frame because of SGML being an International Standard and the governmental procurement processes that mandate the use of standards over ad hoc solutions, which procedural markup is, and system suppliers not wishing to lose business because they could deal with the new published standard. At this moment I can't lay my hands on my copy of those proceedings but I do recall that the procedural editor being used was WPS-PLUS. Although I was never involved in that project it did appear to be a sensible way to convert from old-fashioned procedural to modern structural markup. I jotted down some OPS-5-like rules in an attempt to create an expert system that would ease this conversion. And in moments of craziness return to them adding more and more special cases to cover how people use procedural stuff. I also got stuck on the input phase of dealing with the multiplicity of formats being spewed out by Microsoft Word let alone all the other proprietary word processing and DTP formats that exist. Some one else tried a similar project that converted groff/troff files from a limited set of ms/mm/etc macros to a more structural form. It may also have included some TeX conversion too. This would also have been in the early 1990s. I thought it was Eric Raymond but there's nothing on his web site about it now. My memory is that the person abandoned the task quite quickly because of the complexity of the task. Just what does bold-italic-numbered-size 14-roman actually mean in the specific context in which it occurs; in one document it might be a procedural rendition of a section head but in another the same author might intend it to be emphasis (rendered simply as bold). However, there is a solution to the original poster's request. Include all the original markup from the pasted in document under a TeX escape. It won't be pretty and as with the work-arounds already being used will require manual intervention to convert to LaTeX's pseudo structural markup scheme. Regards, Trevor. <>< Re: deemed!
