Re: Another DITA question

[Stuart Burnfield <slb -at- westnet -dot- com -dot- au>]

Hi Kevin -

I've converted quite a few unstructured documents from FrameMaker and 
Word to SGML. I was always alert to the possibility of preprocessing the 
source docs and writing conversion macros to try to preserve the 
formatting, but in practice I found that it was easier just to save the 
  smaller docs as plain text and add the *ML tags manually.

This was particularly true for Word docs as the formatting tended to be 
more haphazard (manual formats mixed in correctly applied styles).

For larger documents we tried various Save As XML options to get the 
content into a sort of generic XML format, then opened the file in 
TextPad and used Find/Replace to convert the generic tags to the actual 
SGML tags. Word's own XML output was useless for our purposes. We 
experimented with opening the Word docs in OpenOffice.org and exporting 
to XML and found that to be promising.

Note that there's a lot more to converting an unstructured document to 
DITA than just applying correct DITA tags.


This vendor supports conversion from Word to DITA:
http://www.legacydataconversion.com/word.html

If I understand their price list correctly it would cost you about $2000 
to convert three 250-page manuals. I haven't used them myself but you 
can get a sample conversion to check the quality of the output.


If you have any questions about the conversion process I use, fire away.

Good luck

Stuart
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