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jsc · 08-02-2006, 05:13 PM

I just got rtf2latex2e compiled for OS X and used it to convert a Baen RTF. It helped some, but I have to say it's simply not very good. I had to deal with a great number of unbalanced environment tags (italics started but never ended) and a large section of boldface which was not visible in the RTF. This may be because the RTF file included some formatting badness, but I think the above suggestion to use OpenOffice to convert to xhtml is better.

Unfortunately, the xhtml generated by OpenOffice uses CSS heavily, so it's not always obvious what markup to substitute. Italics is not done with an i tag, it is a p tag with a CSS class. Still, it puts it in a format that's at least workable. The final issue is to replace double and single quotes with appropriate text quotes, for which I'm working on a script to do heuristically (you can't just count on there being left-right quote pairs, since multiple paragraphs in quotes are traditionally started with but not ended by a text quote).

08-02-2006, 05:13 PM	#11
jsc Member Posts: 12 Karma: 10 Join Date: Jul 2006	I just got rtf2latex2e compiled for OS X and used it to convert a Baen RTF. It helped some, but I have to say it's simply not very good. I had to deal with a great number of unbalanced environment tags (italics started but never ended) and a large section of boldface which was not visible in the RTF. This may be because the RTF file included some formatting badness, but I think the above suggestion to use OpenOffice to convert to xhtml is better. Unfortunately, the xhtml generated by OpenOffice uses CSS heavily, so it's not always obvious what markup to substitute. Italics is not done with an i tag, it is a p tag with a CSS class. Still, it puts it in a format that's at least workable. The final issue is to replace double and single quotes with appropriate text quotes, for which I'm working on a script to do heuristically (you can't just count on there being left-right quote pairs, since multiple paragraphs in quotes are traditionally started with but not ended by a text quote).