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Re: [xsl] Advice on dictionary conversion

2011-01-19 12:01:13
Grateful thanks to all who responded to my enquiry on this subject. I am encouraged to persevere.

Several people advised to do the conversion as a series of small steps, and I will keep that in mind. However, I am developing my conversion on a non-final version of a part of the dictionary (the letter D), so it must be re-runnable on the other letters, as well as on the final version of D!

I will see how far I can get with a simple series of "template match" operations, before I think about anything more advanced. Whatever can't be done that way may be feasible manually; and in any case I expect to do manual tidying-up of odd cases and data errors which would not be covered by a programmed conversion.

Although there are plenty of webpages about XSLT, it is difficult to find the information you want. For example, I spent most of a day putting this together: <xsl:template match="my_element[@font-weight='bold' and contains(preceding-sibling::node()[1], '=')]"> But I suppose there are a few things in it that I will not need to learn a second time.

There were some interesting comments on the initial doc/rtf to xml conversion. I tried several, and here are some figures, for the letter D.
  .doc file 772 KB
  Word save as rtf  711 KB
  Word save as txt  286 KB
  Word 2003 save as xml   4592 KB
  Novosoft rtf-to-fo   2624 KB  (http://www.rtf-to-xml.com/)
  Walter rtf-to-xml   400 KB   (http://thewalter.net/stef/software/rtfx/)
  Walter rtf-to-xml with -p parameter   536 KB
  Yawc doc-to-xml  433 KB   (http://www.yawcpro.com/)
Unfortunately (for me) the Walter and Yawc conversions both discarded small-caps info. I haven't noticed anything important discarded in the Novosoft conversion, but it is still a lot smaller than the MS one.

Incidentally, the original Word files make no use of styles, but are all in "normal".

Many thanks again,
Ciarán Ó Duibhín





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