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
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Wendell Piez
mailto:wapiez(_at_)mulberrytech(_dot_)com
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
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Mulberry Technologies: A Consultancy Specializing in SGML and XML
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