Re: Another DITA question

[Jay Maechtlen <techwriter -at- covad -dot- net>]

Kevin McGowan wrote:
> Hi again everyone,

> 
> The old Word docs are now in decent shape, but still far from perfectly 
> structured. I'm looking at these hundreds of pages and starting to picture 
> myself going through them, line-by-line, and copying the text into XML.
> 

huh?
cut-and-paste makes no sense at all.

Surely you can get a good first cut by using styles to delineate topics
and such?

Once the styles are set, either
1) a VBA script to grab the text a block at a time per styles and put
the chunks into individual topic files with the DITA markup

or
2) save to some flavor of HTML and use your favorite scripting language

or
3) a transform from /Word's XML (probably the bare/stripped kind) into
topics

wouldn't be all that hard?

regards
Jay
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