I am in a huge project trying to come up with ways to convert from so many markup languages to XML.
any suggestion or ideas.

Thanks.

Which Markup languages?

to mention a few:
HTML to XML.
PDF to XML.
Word to XML.
Quark to XML.

Sorry for making this post so broad. Please let me know if you need anymore details.

Thanks.

I hate huge projects. But one thing I've learnt about them is that you don't even start thinking about design ideas until you know the requirements. And you haven't said anything about the requirements.

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/
Author, XSLT Programmer's Reference and XPath 2.0 Programmer's Reference

The main requirements are:
1) Generate an XML file based on the companies DTD
2) flexibilty in the conversion language (XSLT, Ruby, C++..etc)

does that help?

Well PDF and WORD are not markup. I am currently involved in a project to convert Word to XML. I found nothing on the market that works well, so we copy and paste. It may sound crazy, but pasting into XML is fast and easy because I dont have to format content.

>does that help?

No.

Forums like this work best when you have specific technical or coding questions. To help people with design on a large project you need a lot of background knowledge about the objectives of the project, the business drivers, the priorities of the stakeholders, the size and scale of the undertaking, the skills of the development team, constraints on the choice of technology, the approach to risk. It would be quite unprofessional to give advice without that background knowledge.

If you had a specific problem, like converting a particular source document to a particular XML target, that would be a different matter.

bonekrusher suggested copy and paste. That might be the right solution for one project and quite the wrong solution for another. It's quite impossible to tell from the information you have given.

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/
Author, XSLT Programmer's Reference and XPath 2.0 Programmer's Reference

My apologies for being unprofessional myself in the way I posted this topic. But was offered to me with additional requirements, I am not even sure where to start myself!

>background knowledge about the objectives of the project
the main objective is to convert from any XML file to our XML. I know how to convert from one XML file to another, based on XSLT. But I am talking about converting 50 or more different XML's to our XML, which means creating 50 different XSLT's for each conversion. I was hoping there is way to either create XSLT's faster or use an existing application that can make the conversion faster.

Also, PDF will sound a lot easier to convert. Since all PDF files are the same, and once you have created a way to convert one PDF to XML, the rest should follow! I can't afford the time to copy and paste, each file is at least 70,000 lines.


>the business drivers

Not sure what that means!

>the priorities of the stakeholders
to have an application developed in-house. We are trying to get away from sending conversion to outsource.

>the skills of the development team
I am the project manager as well the technical manager for the project. We have very skilled developers but none with conversion experience.
>constraints on the choice of technology
no constraint. If the product works, and is reliable, cost is not an issue.
>the approach to risk.
The only rick we have is time.

As mentioned above, most conversion projects are being outsourced. And we are falling in the gap of losing the conversion expertise to outsource. In other words, we are very dependable on them.

PDF is the hardest thing of all to convert to XML, because there's so little useful structure available - and what there is varies enormously depending on the tool that generated the PDF. In the past I've said that converting PDF to XML is like converting hamburgers into cows. Sometimes it's best to print it out on paper and then scan it back in.

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/
Author, XSLT Programmer's Reference and XPath 2.0 Programmer's Reference

what about other markup language, especially XML.
I know I can use XSLT or some mapping tools to do the conversion, since the files are huge I am running into the problem of application "freezing".