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Debbie, I like your analysis, but:
At 02:35 AM 4/27/2007, you wrote: You might be able to develop a workflow whereby you convert the Unstructured documents into Structured FrameMaker (scariness factor 2.5), associate it with an EDD, and save it as XML. Because the "Add Structure" feature in FrameMaker has limitations, you will have to do more XSLT afterwards to get anything useful (scariness factor 1.8). I take it that the scariness factor here is open-ended and on a logarithmic scale? (Is the conversion into Structured Framemaker more or less than twice as scary as the follow-on XSLT?) Is "heart-stoppingly scary" a 10, or only a 5? Also (perhaps a related question), does the metric include a subjectivity index? But you probably won't find any free tools to do it, sorry. FrameMaker documents differ so much that the Add Structure process has to be hand-rolled to your particular format. Then there's the matter of what you want the XML to look like. In short, even if you did find someone else who has done this (I'm one of them) their converters would be almost useless for you without a lot of customization. For anyone who's listening, I think there's a growing and potentially quite (very) large market for this kind of work. Getting Out of Word is of course the Everest of this range. (Or maybe: Word is the Marianas Trench.) Semi-automated approaches are often the best (product plug for climbing Everest: Inera eXstyles). Consultants exist for you to outsource this kind of migration to; I'm not one of them, but I have met some, and in hindsight I probably should have used one when I hit this problem. Though I will say that I learned a ton of XSLT in the process. There needs to be a bit more supply before the demand will grow. Current impediments: * The people with the relevant expertise are still fairly scarce * Frequently, their hands are tied by various circumstances of employment such as contracts and NDAs * There is a lot to know and to keep up with, and every job is peculiar * The supply of and demand for this expertise is not unrelated to the first point under discussion, namely the scariness factors and control thereof The silver lining: for this kind of work, XSLT 2.0 rocks. Cheers, Wendell ====================================================================== Wendell Piez mailto:wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Mulberry Technologies, Inc. http://www.mulberrytech.com 17 West Jefferson Street Direct Phone: 301/315-9635 Suite 207 Phone: 301/315-9631 Rockville, MD 20850 Fax: 301/315-8285 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Mulberry Technologies: A Consultancy Specializing in SGML and XML ======================================================================
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