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RE: Replacement for DOS Ventura Publisher for publishing book
Subject:RE: Replacement for DOS Ventura Publisher for publishing book From:"Cliver, Barry" <CliverBarry -at- PRAIntl -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Tue, 15 Feb 2005 17:28:02 -0500
<<I'm forwarding the following email from a colleague. He is looking to
replace a very old DOS-based version of Ventura Publisher that is
currently used to format a tagged ASCII file generated from a database.
Apparently the latest version of Ventura does not work because it does
not accommodate special characters.>>
Hi Phoebe,
Is your friend looking to migrate the ASCII files to a new word
processing/publishing tool? or upgrade the database in which the ASCII
files are stored?
Unicode solves all of the problems you are currently experiencing with
foreign language and special accent characters. The UTF-8 representation
of unicode supports single-byte languages such as English and
double-byte languages such as Japanese. Contemporary databases support
UTF-8 encoding. It sounds like your current database does not, but you
should confirm that first. (If using Oracle, check the database
character set parameter in the init.ora file). You can easily migrate
tab-delimited or comma-separated value ASCII files to a new database
using standard ETL tools (extraction, transformation, loading). If using
Oracle, you can use Oracle SQL*Loader.
If you want to import the ASCII files into a new word
processor/publishing tool, I don't know of a way for the target tool to
recognize the unique tags you mention in your ASCII files outside of
using a macro. I'm only familiar with Word and FrameMaker. Maybe someone
else can speak authoritatively on that. AuthorIT uses SQL Server to
store content files, and yes you can easily import your ASCII files to
SQL Server. You can also encode SQL Server to use UTF-8. Any database
administrator or someone with database experience can help you with
that.
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