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From: guy@rlgvax.UUCP (Guy Harris)
Newsgroups: net.text,net.wanted
Subject: Re: Translating Between Different Word Processors
Message-ID: <1608@rlgvax.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 22-Jan-84 16:34:42 EST
Article-I.D.: rlgvax.1608
Posted: Sun Jan 22 16:34:42 1984
Date-Received: Mon, 23-Jan-84 02:47:20 EST
References: <315@bnl.UUCP>
Organization: CCI Office Systems Group, Reston, VA
Lines: 24

I remember hearing of an extension to ASCII to support various special
characters, which the DEC personal computers were using.  Does anybody know
whether this is an official ANSI X3 standard, and what the number is?
(Unfortunately, even though most word processing software probably uses ASCII
for the regular characters, they all had to choose their own extension to
ASCII for the special characters, so such a standard may be closing the
barn door later than would be desired.)

For things like equations, it may not help, as some systems may build up
formulae out of regular characters while others may choose a special
internal representation, as equations are more complicated beasts than text.
Doing it "right" means implementing a structured implementation, where instead
of just saying "a sigma appears here" the sigma is coupled with the summation
limits and with the term of the sum - sort of like the difference between
doing it directly in "troff" and doing it with something like EQN or TeX.

A company called Altertext, in Boston, makes a Z80-based box with two rather
flexible floppy-disk drives (which can read several disk formats) and a
communications link, and they have software that translates between various
document formats by going into and out of an internal code; you may be able
to get what you want with their box.

	Guy Harris
	{seismo,ihnp4,allegra}!rlgvax!guy