experiment with enscript scares me

experiment with enscript scares me

[Charles Hallenbeck]

Hi gang,

Yesterday Geoff told us about the production of rtf documents
from text documents with enscript. I had just finished preparing
a formatted text document of nearly 10000 words and decided to
see what happens if I create   an RTF document from that
formatted text version, and then recover it with rtf2htm and the
lynx --dump option. Just for comparison I also asked enscript to
create an html document from the same formatted text file, and
then I applied lynx with the --dump option on it also. The
results are pretty scary.

First, here is the wc output of the original file, which gives
the line count, the word count, and the byte count:

953    9614   50635

Next, the wc output from the html conversion only:

963    9624   50851

Looks like the document grew by 10 lines, 10 words, and 216
bytes.

Finally, here is the wc output from the RTF+html conversion:

704    8045   46841

Examining this converted and reconverted document in an editor
reveals gross errors, with some words missing, others
concatenated, and whole lines missing throughout the document.

I guess the point is - if you plan to use enscript to go the RTF
route, you had better watch it closely and double check your
work. For me, it has screwed  up pretty badly.

Chuck


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Re: experiment with enscript scares me

[Geoff Shang]

Hi:

ah yeah, I did in fact notice this.  This was for a file to send off, and I
said to the person it was sent to to report if there were any problems with
it, and they didn't say there was.  I'm thinking of writing to them again
to make doubly sure it was OK.

Interesting thing though, words that I saw missing were in fact in the
file.  Perhaps one program doesn't know the other's syntax.  And as far as
I'm concerned, as long as msword understands it, I'm not fussed.

Geoff.