I've been given a task at work of placing a policy manual online, with full keyword searching and crosslinking. As part of the task, the client wants to be able to update the manual regularly, and have changes between versions shown in bold. (the changes from the version before can be lost). When I mentioned RCS/CVS, they thought that sounded wonderful.

My recommendation to them was to convert their manual (currently thousands of pages in WordPerfect 5.2) to ASCII text, which would work in just about any word processor, now and in the future. It also works quite well with diff, cvs, and other text tools I have access to :) And of course, it can convert to HTML fairly cleanly.

This is all aided by the fact that they have a set of rules that the document(s) are written by, making automatic conversion plausible.

So I am now looking at converting text to HTML. In particular, I need to be able to recognize nested outline format, and table-like listings. HTML::FromText is nice, but doesn't support this well-enough. I'm currently entertaining either using Parser::RecDescent, or hacking up additions to HTML::FromText. Has anyone tried to do repeated automatic text to HTML conversion on this scale?

In reply to Parsing Text by swiftone

Title:
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