Idris Samawi Hamid wrote:
> Would it be possible to define an xml format for the journal so that I
> could more easily process both ConTeXt/LaTeX articles as well as the
> docs and rtfs I generally receive? Is this more work than it's worth?
> It's a humanities journal, so little-to-no math.
Math is, in my experience, the worst part of it, so you an consider
yourself happy that you don't need it.
The question is, what problems of the current process are you trying to
improve/solve with a possible move to xml?
If your most pressing problem is the variety of data formats you
receive articles in, then no, xml won't help. You'd still need some way
of transforming the articles to the format of your choice. That being
said, XML may be a very good intermediate step from Word or rtf to
ConTeXt, if only because OpenOffice has pretty advanced import filters
and stores its data in a straightforward xml format that should be easy
to transform, assuming you start with a sufficiently rich set of
predefined formats and somehow get people to either use them (fat
chance, I know) or have them be sufficiently different that you can
automatically or at least semi-automatically classify the author's
formatting to your presets. In really simple cases (e.g., pure prose)
you may get away with accepting HTML and converting that.
If your most serious problem is a variety of output formats you want to
support (print/pdf, html, some eBook variants, ...), xml is a perfect
technique to develop a solution.
If getting lots of different encodings is a problem of yours, xml
solves that nicely as well. But just for that, there are simpler and
less intrusive ways.
Other things xml may solve well:
- archivability (although your ConTeXt files are probably no worse)
- reusability: Almost everything in a file following a well-designed
xml format is local and you can simply copy a (complete) block of
text + markup and insert it into another file.
- consistency, enforcing rules: While it is possible to enforce things
like “every article must start with an abstract containing one to
three paragraphs” in TeX, it is way easier in xml.
- all sorts of conversions, including shuffling around or extracting
data of interest
Things xml won't do any magic for:
- layout. You'd need to write a conversion to ConTeXt or whatever.
Depending on your needs, this can be anything from trivial (say,
two hours) to almost undoable (although this would mean the xml
format is particularly badly designed for your journal).
Both lists are certainly incomplete. I hope you will get other answers
as well.
regards,
Christopher
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