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Subject: Re: DOCBOOK: RFC -> DocBook converter
At 1:19 AM +1000 5/18/00, Chuck Dale wrote: >Before I start thinking about writing a Perl script to do this I was >wondering if this had been done before? What about more generic >Formatted text -> DocBook conversion? It's not as simple as it seems from one RFC. As one of the first demos of a technology I helped develop called Metaphoria (http://www.metaphoria.net/), we created an app that presented a real-time view of the RFCs, parsing them on-demand into sections and presenting them as hyperlinked HTML with tables of contents, etc. A few of the gotchas I can recall are: The RFCs often have ASCII-based drawings, which are hard to detect. There are also different ways that they express section numbers (or not at all), and some of them have a table of contents that you have to get past before you find the content. Furthermore, some of them have errors and internal inconsistencies (like a section 13.1 without a section 13, etc.) It's probably not impossible to create a processor that would handle all of the RFCs, but we eventually found it to be subject to the law of diminishing returns. It may be more useful to take a subset of the RFCs you consider "interesting", and just deal with them. -- +-------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Dave Makower <davemak@iclick.com> | | Director of Portal Architecture & Development | +--------------------------------+----------------------------------+ | iClick, Inc. | (914) 872-8030 | | 120 Bloomingdale Road | (914) 872-8100 fax | | 3rd Floor | (914) 872-8000 main | | White Plains, NY 10605 | http://www.iclick.com/ | +--------------------------------+----------------------------------+
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