«

Hi!

I work with technical documentation and constantly run into the
problem of one of the major companies in the railway industry sticking
to Quicksilver and claiming that any conversion is highly troublesome
and expensive (not even mentioning any conversion to MS Word or
Framemaker...)

Now, the question is: However good Quicksilver is, is it totally
impossible/awfully complicated to convert a QS document to XML (or
Framemaker) or are these people just unwilling to do anything unless
they get heaps of money?

We're not just talking text here - there are a number of illustrations
and photos that have to be brought along as well. Does this work, or
should they remove all illustrations and convert the rest to ASCII and
attach a folder with the figures for me to import when using
Framemaker from which XML conversion is fairly straightforward?

Any response out of personal experience highly appreciated.

Besst regards -

Rocambole

> Now, the question is: However good Quicksilver is, is it totally
> impossible/awfully complicated to convert a QS document to XML (or
> Framemaker) or are these people just unwilling to do anything unless
> they get heaps of money?

XML is raw syntax. You could almost certainly define a representation
which expressed everything that Quicksilver covers; whether it would be
worth doing depends on what your needs are, and whether Quicksilver
(whatever that is) is standardized and documented well enough to define
reliable conversions.

> We're not just talking text here - there are a number of illustrations
> and photos that have to be brought along as well.

As far as XML is concerned, those are raw data. They probably contain
bytes that are forbidden in XML and/or would have to be escaped; I would
recommend either moving them out into separate files and having a syntax
which points to those files (which, of course, is what HTML/XHTML did,
and which I believe is how XSL:FO handles graphics) or -- if they really
need to be embedded into a single document -- doing a base64 conversion
to get them into a form which XML will accept as text. Of course it'll
be up to you to either retrieve them or convert them back when you want
to display them.

If you want to know how difficult this will be, you need to get someone
to spend the time to work up a formal proposal and estimate. Which
probably means paying them for the time they spend doing so, unless you
can find an enthusiastic volunteer or are willing to spend the time to
bootstrap your own skills to the point where you can do it.

Have fun. Good luck. (Don't ask; I'm not volunteering.)