RE: Converting HTML to plain text

Good luck,
Wendell

Hi Wendell,

I can constrain HTML pages to be valid XML. So, the hard part is solved.
But still I don't know of a good solution to covert it to plain text. I
tried XSL FO with Apache FOP using IBM Developerworks XSL for converting
xhtml to fo
(http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/x-xslfo2app/). It does
proper conversion, but it has the following issues:
1) the formatting looks really bad. It has too much white space (most of
the words are separated by multiple space chars instead of 1).
2) If I change the font family, font size and line height as suggested
by the Apache FOP site, consequent lines are overwriting each other.
3) I had to specify the column width in pt. If by chance the column has
a word that does not fit into the given width, it is truncated instead
of wrapping.

Note: Some others that I have tried.
1) w3m does a good job. But it is C++ code and I cannot use it.
2) Redhat has some java classes, but their conversion is very primitive.
They don't format tables at all (each cell is rendered one after another
vertically instead of a grid-like rendering).

-- Radha

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Wendell Piez                            mailto:wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Mulberry Technologies, Inc.                http://www.mulberrytech.com
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Suite 207                                          Phone: 301/315-9631
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