Is there a fast way to wrap unstructured text into [Para] tags?

[Chris Despopoulos]

No doubt you're right, Rick.  I'm in the "If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail" mode.  I think Smart Paste is a great feature.  Also, I think you can use it with zero thought in this case...  All the gestures are menu commands already in the products.  Worse, DITA is probably overkill -- OTOH, DITA might be a good format.  Look at the Project Gutenberg DITA versions of classic texts.  Here is a very quick way to convert a book to DITA without thinking about it much at all.  For a one-off, this might be easy enough to do.


I'm also thinking Smart Paste is a good way to get Word => HTML => Structured Maker.  I think there's more promise in that use case.



________________________________
 From: Rick Quatro <rick at rickquatro.com>
To: 'Chris Despopoulos' <despopoulos_chriss at yahoo.com>; 'Theresa de Valence' <TdeV at bstw.com>; framers at lists.frameusers.com 
Sent: Friday, May 23, 2014 7:18 AM
Subject: RE: Is there a fast way to wrap unstructured text into [Para] tags?
 


You guys like to do things the hard way! Conversion Tables are so easy to set and simple to use, especially for a simple structure like you have. I am sorry, but Smart Paste is not the best way to do this. Theresa, I offered to help you, but haven't heard from you. Oh well, have fun with Smart Paste.
 
Rick
 
Rick Quatro
Carmen Publishing Inc.
585-366-4017
rick at frameexpert.com
 
 
 
From:framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com [mailto:framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com] On Behalf Of Chris Despopoulos
Sent: Friday, May 23, 2014 4:51 AM
To: Theresa de Valence; framers at lists.frameusers.com
Subject: Re: Is there a fast way to wrap unstructured text into [Para] tags?
 
 
Open the HTML in a browser.  The idea of Smart Paste is that it knows how to take different formats of data on the clipboard and convert it to the given Maker Structure App on the fly.  Under the covers it uses an XSLT -- But It think the DITA Topic struct app comes with Smart Paste already set up.  DocBook may also be set up.
 
Anyway, if you opened the chapter in Maker, then it should be a ton of body paragraphs, with maybe a title, right?  In that case, saving as HTML will create a ton of <p> elems.  Copy those from the browser, and Smart Paste will turn them into a bunch of DITA <p> elems.  I guess this is kind of round-about.  But it looks like it would be very easy, and let the computer do most of the work.  
 
*  Open your chapter in Maker
*  Save as HTML
*  Open HTML in browser
*  Open a new DITA topic in Maker
*  Select the chapter and copy from the browser
*  Put the insertion point in the DITA topic/body and choose Smart Paste
 
Now you have the chapter in Maker, with structure.  
 
Smart Paste will go further than that...  It can do lists and tables, for example.  And nesting (I believe).  It's just my latest favorite feature, so I figure you should use it for everything, including databases and cleaning your closet.  :)
 
cud

________________________________

From:Theresa de Valence <TdeV at bstw.com>
To: Chris Despopoulos <despopoulos_chriss at yahoo.com>; "framers at lists.frameusers.com" <framers at lists.frameusers.com> 
Sent: Thursday, May 22, 2014 1:52 PM
Subject: Re: Is there a fast way to wrap unstructured text into [Para] tags?

On 5/22/2014 12:10 PM, Chris Despopoulos wrote:
> I'd say what you're doing wrongly is saving as XML first.  Save your
> unstructured doc as HTML, then copy/smart-paste into the body tag of a
> new DITA topic.

I saved the file as .htm and the name of the file in Frame was still 
.fm, but I can see that the .htm exists. What do I open the .htm with? 
If I choose Frame, a dialogue box pops up wanting to know what kind of 
document it is, e.g. RTF Japanese, SGML, Text, XML


Thanks.
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