TechWhirl (TECHWR-L) is a resource for technical writing and technical communications professionals of all experience levels and in all industries to share their experiences and acquire information.
For two decades, technical communicators have turned to TechWhirl to ask and answer questions about the always-changing world of technical communications, such as tools, skills, career paths, methodologies, and emerging industries. The TechWhirl Archives and magazine, created for, by and about technical writers, offer a wealth of knowledge to everyone with an interest in any aspect of technical communications.
Subject:TagWrite -- the results From:Alison Bloor <alisonb -at- MMTECH -dot- CO -dot- UK> Date:Tue, 21 Nov 1995 11:40:44 GMT
A week or so ago, after a fairly fruitless morning, I posted to ask
whether anyone had penetrated the TagWrite documentation and found
the product to be useful.
Well, the results are in, and the scores are as follows:
No. of people who said they found TagWrite useful: 0
No. of people who said they had come across TagWrite: 0
Can't say I'm surprised.
Later that day, I did find that there are a couple of TagWrite filters
built into Ventura (under Load Text), and one of these makes a reasonable
job of reading in an .rtf file, allowing you to map each paragraph
style to a tag in the Ventura stylesheet.
As for creating my own filters, I decided to forget about that for
the time being. If one day I am presented with some very large files
to be converted from one format to another, I _might_ take another
look, but I'd make very sure I'd exhausted any other possibilities first.
There were a couple of replies to my posting though:
Pat'O waxed lyrical about the VenEdit editor that came with Ventura 3.0,
and wondered if it was in any way similar to TagWrite. Sadly, Pat, the
answer is 'no', TagWrite is concerned solely with format conversion.
What's even sadder is that VenEdit sounds a whole heap more useful
that the Ventura 5.0 'Copy Editor', the nearest thing to a text editor
you get in 5.0. No macros or key-mappings, as far as I know. I agree
with you about PFE though -- I use it a lot.
Sarah Lee Bihlmayer had some sound advice about learning HTML. I agree,
Sarah, that you need to know HTML in order to produce reasonable HTML
documents. I have so far been converting/creating HTML by hand, finding
that a text editor (the afore-mentioned PFE, in fact!) is perfectly
adedquate for my needs. However, for large volumes, I would imagine
that a simple conversion filter to do the 'grunt' work -- converting
the obvious tags, inserting appropriate <HEAD>, <BODY>, <P> tags, etc. --
could be useful. Then I could concentrate on the fun part: structuring
the links, tweaking the 'layout', etc.
Thanks to those who replied, and indeed to those who didn't,
