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From: bmug@garnet.berkeley.edu (BMUG)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: UNIX -> Mac WP conversion
Message-ID: <21317@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 8 Mar 89 17:09:53 GMT
References: <21217@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <2679@pegasus.ATT.COM>
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In article <2679@pegasus.ATT.COM> ech@pegasus.ATT.COM (Edward C Horvath) writes:
>From article <21217@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>, by jfh@enzyme.berkeley.edu (John Heckendorn):
>> Well, the news on converting vi-type UNIX files to RTF or another
>> Macintosh format is that there is currently *no* utility that will
>> do a complete job...
>
>I don't understand what you want: vi is an editor for straight ascii
>text, and any Mac WP I've seen is happy to accept straight text.
>Add a "ruler" with tabs every 8 (or 4, or whatever) spaces, select a
>fixed-width font (Monaco, Courier) and you've reduced your mac to a vt100.
>
>If what you REALLY want is nroff (troff) -> MacWP, then a possible solution
>is to write a back-end for DITroff (Device-Independent troff).  That's how
>the PostScript printer drivers do the deed.
>
>Or, if what you want is reformatted text, try the McSink shareware DA editor
>(or its commercial version, Vantage); these have options to join-and-wrap
>text to a variety of boundaries.
>
>All these solutions are fairly well-defined and well-understood.  So what
>do you REALLY want?
>
>=Ned Horvath=

Well, what I want is reformatted text.  That is, I want to be able to
convert *all* of the laboriously placed n/troff formatting commands
to a Macintosh format which can reproduce their effects in Macland.
To wit: converting all \fI, etc., to italics (MakeWrite can already
do this much); converting \(*g, etc., to gammas in Symbol font, 
knowing what .pp, .ip, .ce, and the like are for in terms of paragraph
and heading formats, \u and \d for super-, subscripts and returns to
normal line formatting, typeface and fontsize changes, and the other
two hundred or so formatting commands available for n/troff.  From
what I can tell, RTF would be the most natural (though not the lowest
common denominator) medium, given that most or all of n/troff 
formatting commands have some analogue in RTF (I don't think the same
can be said of MacWrite format, though it's still more or less the
lingua franca of Mac WP formats).

If somebody out there is interested in writing such a conversion
beast, perhaps it would be worth supporting tbl and eqn conversion
also (grin).

Now it may be possible that Nisus, with its powerful grep facility,
and with a few macros, could do the trick; I'm currently trying to
get a press eval copy for an analytical review.  If I'm successful,
and if there's interest, I'll post a summary of my results to
the net.  Judging from the email response to my first posting, 
there's certainly a need out there for a conversion utility of
the type I've described.

John Heckendorn
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