Partial automation of saving to HTML?
Posted: 2010-05-28 19:05:56
In a way almost the opposite of what Nick D was asking on 3.3.2009, I have written a glossary, intended to be publlished online, currently 210,000 words, concerned with aspects of linguistics bearing on speech and language pathology, education and evolution, and a new hypothesis about how these link together, with about 500 entries and many thousands of internal links. This greatly expands the glossary of a PhD thesis (which the good people at Nisus were wonderful in helping with on a most difficult technical point). There are reasons, not relevant here, for not putting all of this in Wikipedia.
To manage and accurately maintain such a glossary I think I need a desk top app which parses for font size and style, and converts formatted Nisus text into text with HTML specifications (a bit like a function under 'Save as', but in a quite different way converts an underlined 'linguistics' to <a href="linguistics.html">linguistics</a>, and scans the document for an entry corresponding to the link, at a specified larger font size, but allows an underlined 'linguistic' to be manually edited to <a href="linguistic.html">linguistics</a>. I have a set of seven if then procedures for this, too long for here.
I can of course do this conversion manually. But this would be a most enormous task, and one very prone to error. So it would be vastly preferable to partially automate this. But speaking as a non-programmer, it would seem to me necessary to know how Nisus encodes font-size, underlining, and other such specifications which can be represented in HTML. I should be very grateful for any comments about how I might proceed here. Obviously this function cannot be done completely automatically because of the many cases where for text reasons it is necessary to link from adjective to noun or from plural to singular, and so on. Are there any programmers who would be interested in writing an app, I wonder? My set of seven procedures seems to me quite straightforward. Obviously we would have to agree a fee in such a case. Or is this reinventing the wheel? Maybe there are tools already in existence for just this purpose?
Aubrey Nunes (real name)
To manage and accurately maintain such a glossary I think I need a desk top app which parses for font size and style, and converts formatted Nisus text into text with HTML specifications (a bit like a function under 'Save as', but in a quite different way converts an underlined 'linguistics' to <a href="linguistics.html">linguistics</a>, and scans the document for an entry corresponding to the link, at a specified larger font size, but allows an underlined 'linguistic' to be manually edited to <a href="linguistic.html">linguistics</a>. I have a set of seven if then procedures for this, too long for here.
I can of course do this conversion manually. But this would be a most enormous task, and one very prone to error. So it would be vastly preferable to partially automate this. But speaking as a non-programmer, it would seem to me necessary to know how Nisus encodes font-size, underlining, and other such specifications which can be represented in HTML. I should be very grateful for any comments about how I might proceed here. Obviously this function cannot be done completely automatically because of the many cases where for text reasons it is necessary to link from adjective to noun or from plural to singular, and so on. Are there any programmers who would be interested in writing an app, I wonder? My set of seven procedures seems to me quite straightforward. Obviously we would have to agree a fee in such a case. Or is this reinventing the wheel? Maybe there are tools already in existence for just this purpose?
Aubrey Nunes (real name)
