Xref: utzoo alt.hypertext:658 comp.text:7609
Path: utzoo!utgpu!cs.utexas.edu!execu!sequoia!balkan!dogface!zitt!joe
From: joe [Joe Zitt]
Newsgroups: alt.hypertext,comp.text
Subject: Re: Designing Online Documents
Message-ID: <DwJss1w163w@zitt>
Date: 17 Nov 90 17:32:12 GMT
References: <5514@newton.praxis.co.uk>
Organization: The Shekhinah Project, Austin, TX
Lines: 32

mm@praxis.co.uk (Michael Mannion) writes:

[...a few questions about hypertext conversion...]

I've worked on a few projects involving text-hypertext conversion. 
Currently I'm working with a team (about 6 people) to take a large stack 
on man pages (394 of them) and convert them into a hypertext database to 
be read with KRS software.

Horton's book, which you mention, is perhaps one of the best guides.

One important thing, above all else: Don't skimp on planning and 
organisation. If you look carefully at the material, and figure out ahead 
of time what the chunks are, and how they are to be combined and divided, 
you can avoid a LOT of later confusion and retropatching.

If your source materials are available as text files, use Unix tools, as 
possible, to analyse the materials. For example, I've written some awk 
code that extracts the NAME and SEE ALSO information from the man pages, 
and tells me what many of the hypertext links will be, and, more 
importantly, compare SEE ALSO lists against one another, to tell us how 
the information clusters together. In this way, we can assign to each 
writer a cluster of related articles, rather than dividing the list 
automatically by title. Through a careful use of awk, grep, and sed, I 
also hope to be able to insert and check the links automatically.

Putting hypertext together involves a lot of stuff that is too boring, 
detail oriented, and repetitive to be left for humans. Let the computer 
deal with what it good at, and you can deal with the messy leftovers... 
like content :-).

Joe Zitt		...cs.utexas.edu!kvue!zitt!joe 		(512)450-1916