Subject: Re: XHTML <-> abw conversion question
From: John L. Clark (jlc6@po.cwru.edu)
Date: Tue Oct 16 2001 - 17:36:49 CDT
On Tue, Oct 16, 2001 at 11:07:50PM +0100, Tomas Frydrych wrote:
>
> How well can we represent AW document in XHTML? Are there
> any significant features that we cannot save correctly?
>
> The reason I ask is that RTF is not best for passing bidi documents
> to Word. When Word imports RTF document, its bidi algorithm
> depends solely on the \ltrch and \rtlch tokens. The problem is that
> bidi properties of text cannot be described adequately by mere two
> character types. To create the RTF file we have to convert all the
> characters the visual direction of which is context-sensitive to \ltrch
> or \rtlch, which requires making assumptions about the final layout
> of the text that cannot be granted (e.g., the end reader might have
> a slightly different font installed than the author and that might
> result in different linebreaking).
>
> In contrast, when Word opens an XHTML document, it uses a
> Unicode-based algorithm to do the layout. From this point of view it
> would be much more suitable format to use to pass docs to Word.
>
> Tomas
>
Tomas,
A good question, to be sure. I believe that we can actually get quite
close, if not perfect, although there are a few issues surrounding such
things as columns, and autonumbering is an advanced CSS2 feature which
is not supported by any browser of which I am aware. That being said,
/according to the spec/ it should be doable, but I think it would be
overwhelmingly nontrivial to make it look the same everywhere. The next
thing on my xhtml TODO list (besides squashing those two bugs) is styles
import, and a two-pass style export for style compression and
organization. However, school has hit me like a sledgehammer, as you
guys may or may not have noticed. :)
I would be interested in hearing any thoughts you might have on the
matter.
Take care,
John
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