Re: Interleaf to Word? Probable!

[Steve Fouts <sfouts -at- ELLISON -dot- SC -dot- TI -dot- COM>]

|}
|} Anyone have a ready solution to this problem? We are currently using Word but
|} will change to Interleaf next year. What are we going to do with documents
|} that we are responsible for checking and printing but the 'real' updating of
|} the document is done by a person who uses Word? Is there any way we can
 convert
|} the file into Interleaf (easy) and then back to Word (not-quite-so-easy?)...
|} or am I just wasting my time pondering this. After all, conversions always
|} cause problems - big and small.
|}
|} Art
|}

O.K. Art, I'll speak to this. Interleaf has (comes with) an RTF filter. It is
perfectly capable of extracting the Word documents. The filter also comes with
a "round trip" feature. This allows you to filter documents out of I'leaf and
into word with some control stuff embedded so you don't lose a whole lot of
your I'leaf formatting in the process.

This is a ``smart'' filter, though. It requires that you build a template that
tells the filter what fonts map to what fonts, and what to do with certain
control character combinations, and so forth. A smart filter requires that
you know an awful lot about the documents on either side.

I didn't respond to your previous post because, although I have used the filter
a few times with acceptible results, I was always at a disadvantage. Someone
would come wandering in with a 3.5" DOS floppy with some rtf files saying,
"Here's your source." With no idea just what is on the disk I have to run
the filter with the default template, which generally works pretty well on
a ``default'' word file. Since we are talking about engineers here, who, as
a whole, love to ``tweak'' things, the file I get is never default and the
results are sometimes somewhat questionable.

Since this represents a big change for your company, someone will obviously
have time to sit around and twiddle with the filters and the translation
templates (since a few hours of twiddling might save days of repairing) and
you should be able to get the thing working pretty well. Pretty soon, I
should think that a round trip from Interleaf to Word and back will be like
second nature. Talk to an I'leaf rep. They should be keenly interested in
helping you make the transition as painless as possible.

One more caveat, however. Interleaf has its own graphics package and it is
very good. None of the graphics in your Word documents are native to Word
so you can't really expect Interleaf's rtf filter to handle them well. It
won't. You will probably have to filter your graphics separately.

In my opinion, Interleaf is simply the most powerful, most capable long
document package available on the market today. All of that power has a
pretty steep learning curve, but sooner than you know, you'll be wondering
how you ever lived without it.

Good luck.
Steve
******************** Steve Fouts
*     _    ___     * sfouts -at- ellison -dot- sc -dot- ti -dot- com
*    ( |____|      *
*   _ /\    |\ _   * A man may truly live in his dreams, his noblest dreams,
*  / /  \  _| \ \  * but only, ONLY if he is worthy of those dreams.
* ( * )  \/_|__* ) *                                 --Harlan Ellison
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********************