> Lars Idema <idema@dds.nl> asked:
>
> >> QUESTION: How does one manage to maintain only *one* 'rich-text' document
> >> and draw both HTML and plain ascii documents from it?
>
> Thank heaven for a post about something other than line lengths.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Amen!
As to the question at hand: although I presently maintain only a standard
ASCII version of my FAQ, I'm strongly compelled by the benefits of multiple-
format documents. I'd like to put out ASCII, HTML, and Postscript versions
of the same file. The only means that I've come across for doing this is
the highly powerful, though somewhat kludge-y approach of redoing the
entire file in LaTeX or one of its variants. Then, I can use several
utilities to convert to postscript (dvips), HTML (latex2html), and
ASCII (dvi2tty). LaTeX itself is a generalized markup language, not unlike
HTML, which makes multiple-format documents easy to generate automatically
(I usually write HTML files by hand, but there's _no_way_ that I'll
be doing this for a 180K FAQ, and having to re-do it for each revision!)
Of course, all of this requires spending a fair amount of time learning
LaTeX, not to mention the use of a UNIX system (although there are DOS
ports of most of the TeX/LaTeX utilities, they don't begin to approach
the functionality of their UNIX cousins), and such it's probably impractical
for many FAQ-preparers, although I think that, for my purposes, the time
invested in the learning will be worthwhile in the end.
I'm interested in hearing any other suggestions about this interesting
problem. Certainly, most garden-variety Windows/Mac-based word processors
aren't up to the task (at least it would take a fair amount of futzing with
the mouse to do what I could do in a single command line), yet on the
other hand, there must be an easier method than writing the whole thing
in LaTeX or SGML or some similarly obscure markup language, originally
designed for the typesetting industry.
-- Scott
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