Formatting large amounts of text

[Jono_Moore]

Anyone have any pointers on formatting large amounts of text?

We're looking at close to 200 legal forms for the courts...being as there's no fun stuff like style sheets in LC I'm hoping someone has come up with a way to deal with things like lots of hanging indents and bulleted text, that kind of stuff.

Perhaps formatting in another program and pasting the text in with most formatting retained?

Linked text boxes would be a beautiful thing too, but alas...

These will be dynamic forms so can't use pdf artwork.

[Jono_Moore]

Oh, it's all in FrameMaker currently and I'll need to check but I think it might be available in html and/or xml.

[Iakov_Qvaz]

Wild guess, but if the files could easily be exported to InDesign, then...   easier communication with Acrobat from InDesign?

[_Bruce_Robertson]

Hi Jono,

I'm not sure if this is relevant to what you are trying to do as there is support for stylesheets in XML Forms, at least support for XSLT 1.0.

This is the ideal thing to translate an XML data source to another like XML format like rich text (which supports hanging indents) which you can then display in a text control.

I've attached an example of the sort of thing I've played around with.

Regards

Bruce

[Jono_Moore]

Wow Bruce, you rock!

I don't know if that will help in the immediate situation but I'm definitely filing it for later. My xml-fu is non-existent but we have some xml guys here who will know what to do with it.

Iakov - yeah I'm going to play around with different programs and see what happens for copy paste abilities.

I was playing around with some of the text last night and it actually doesn't take too long to format by hand, once I've got the styles written out - but we're still looking at quite a bit of time over 200 forms.