Re: [Groff] Creating Word/rtf output

[Larry Kollar]

Robert Goulding wrote:

> ... this isn't so different from opening up the
> HTML in OpenOffice, changing the HTML "styles" to standard document
> files and then saving as an rtf/doc.

Indeed, that's the way I've handled requests for a "Word version" of  
docs at work. I've set up my macros to spit out reasonably good HTML,  
that can at least be cleaned up with Tidy. Then again, I don't do  
footnotes very often (or at all).

> It seems to me that I'm going to have to learn OpenOffice's scripting
> language, and figure a way to automate the inclusion of footnote text
> contained in another file.

Perhaps what you could do is to modify the FS/FE macros to wrap the  
footnote text in a div element -- something like:

[div class="footnote"]This is the footnote text.[/div]

There are XSLT scripts out there that will transform XHTML to RTF;  
modifying one of those to handle your footnotes in line would  
probably be the easiest way to deal with this situation.

-- Larry

P.S. On a slightly related note, I've been working on a way to  
extract text from a PDF and transform it to markup based on font face  
and point sizes. It's hardly automatic, given the myriad variations  
in formatting, but I can get reasonable results... again, except for  
footnotes.