[antlr-interest] Parsing RTF to Braille

[Gerald B. Rosenberg]

At 11:46 AM 6/25/2007, Daniel Warner wrote:
>The RTF specification 1.9 from Microsoft is huge. What approach 
>would you suggest in parsing RTF with ANTLR to the mentioned 
>text-based representation of braille (HBS)?
>
>1) Use actions in the grammar rules?
>2) Create an AST from the RTF input and a tree grammar for the AST 
>that outputs HBS?
>3) Use templates?
>4) Other suggestions?

I would strongly suggest implementing a PDF to HBS converter if only 
to avoid the many different/incomplete interpretations of the RTF 
spec.  The PDF spec is substantially smaller and far more uniformly 
implemented.  Conversion from RTF, and many other document formats, 
to PDF can be automated with little difficulty.

In both RTF and PDF, top down left right orientation is common, but 
not required.  Therefore, you can encounter "out of order" text even 
on simple pages.  So, actions for direct output are not likely to be 
useful.  If there is a need to handle footnotes, tables, and columns, 
AST is the only way to go.  You will likely need multiple tree 
walkers to distinguish different text blocks and reorganize the AST 
content into a reasonably consistent form.  Output then should be 
fairly linear, so templates should not be necessary.

HTHs,
Gerald
----
Gerald B. Rosenberg, Esq.
NewTechLaw
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Palo Alto, CA  94306-2009

650.325.2100  (office)  /  650.703.1724  (cell)
650.325.2107  (facsimile)

www.newtechlaw.com


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