Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!mcsun!ukc!warwick!bsrdp
From: bsrdp@warwick.ac.uk (Hylton Boothroyd)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Re: TeX EditoR ?
Keywords: Question on editor
Message-ID: <365@clover.warwick.ac.uk>
Date: 14 Jan 90 14:41:29 GMT
References: <232@netdev.UUCP>
Organization: Warwick Business School
Lines: 21

In article <232@netdev.UUCP> alex@netdev.comsys.com (Alex Huppenthal)
writes:
> Of course, one can save Word docs in clear text format, but that's not
> desirable, because you lose the control information.

An alternative is to save the documents formatted, and to strip the
formatting information before feeding to the screen/printer display
programmes. I messed around with that for a while when I first installed
Microsoft Word 3.1, and wrote two utilities:
    * a simple debug-source-code for a filter to take the start and end
      of the file away - I did that by modifying a disassembly of `more',
    * a Turbo Pascal source to screen the source file for things like
      matching {} and to return code that would allow the controlling
      batch file to abort before gross mistakes were fed to TeX/LaTeX.

For long documents with many input files, however, the consequence was
that I then had to devise a further file-management layer on top of
what was already a fairly complex process. So although I could chug
along with it as a private system, it never seemed to me to be
something suitable for general circulation. Nor is it now. But you get
the general idea.