I can't speak for version 9, but having used 6.1, 7 and 8 to convert a
couple of hundred finding aids I have found much about WP SGML to
recommend it.
First point - with the older versions (I haven't tried the newer ones)
if you save your SGML file as an ASCII .txt file, it loses all your
markup, so please don't (as I did) do this one day with a file you've
been working on for days. Try it on a small file and look at the results
in an ASCII editor.
The parser built into WP is pretty good, but you should run the file
through [N]SGMLS afterwards for a full check.
The major problems I have had with WP relate to the DOCTYPE declaration
and sub-declaration - the options available in the older versions
usually save the whole of the DTD at the front of the sGML document,
rather than the FPI alone. To counteract this, I only do the <ead> ...
</ead> part of the document in WP, and tack the declaration etc on
afterwards. This does make using entities for images etc more awkward.
Where the WP approach has been very useful is in marking up existing
files, as you can write some effective macros to wrap text versions of
the tagging around text blocks and generate ID or normal attributes,
save the file as SGML, perform a couple of substitutions using PERL, and
reload the file as SGML.
--
Richard Higgins
Durham University Library
Dale Peters wrote:
>
> Hi!
> I was interested in this thread. We are about to embark on the first national co-operative digital project in this country, and were planning to use the SGML module in Wordperfect 8. Recently I heard that it does not save in native SGML, and is not self-validating.
>
> If you have any wider experience of these problems, could you comment on this, please? My questions are:
>
> 1) Can you confirm these two problems with WP8?
> 2) Are they resolved in the 2000 version, or
> 3) by saving as a text file, is the issue circumvented anyway?
>
> Many thanks,
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Dr D P Peters
> Campbell Collections of the University of Natal
> 220 Marriott Road, Durban , 4001, South Africa
> Tel: +27-31- 209-5066 Fax: +27-31- 209-1622
> e-mail: [log in to unmask]
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