Re: A question about encoding and text fixing platforms for undergraduate curators

On Thu, 27 Apr 2017, Martin Holmes wrote:

[...]
> XML is not hard. Word, by contrast, is a concoction of frustrations, and 
> getting DOCX into decent TEI when you're done is horribly difficult.

If you create a Word template with styles (whether built-in or custom) that are 
sufficient to define each block-level and inline element that needs to be 
expressed in XML, then it's certainly feasible to set up a workflow involving a 
translation tool like oXgarage. It mainly requires careful analysis of the 
result of oXgarage conversion in order to create a further XSLT transform to 
produce your desired final output. But in our experience (based on using such a 
workflow with distributed authors for a reference project), it's going to be 
almost inevitable that now and then the Word file you receive is going to have 
some kind of unexpected crud in it resulting from the user adding an unforeseen 
style, accidentally changing a format, or doing anything unpredictable. It is 
probably easier to teach people to use a consistent set of markup conventions in 
oXygen than to get them to use MS Word with 100% accuracy according to whatever 
template and style rules you want them to follow.

David

-- 
David Sewell
Manager of Digital Initiatives
The University of Virginia Press
Email: [email protected]   Tel: +1 434 924 9973
Web: http://www.upress.virginia.edu/rotunda