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I am maintaining a growing (250 pages) plaintext document, that really needs to be a PDF technical document. Is there some automatic markup tool I can use that preserves my existing formatting, i.e. headings, subheadings, paragraphs, tables, columns, examples, etc? Once the initial markup (to html/xml) is right, I can move it to PDF more directly, but I would really like to avoid an entire manual reformatting just to keep the formatting it already has.

Chris Cochran
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  • How do you have headings in plaintext? Are they just whitespace? How do you have tables? – Adam Shiemke Apr 03 '12 at 20:48
  • Headings are left-aligned short lines by themselves without a closing period, with indent indicating level. Columns and tables have other obvious and not so obvious rules. I cannot be the only one with this problem--there are millions of pages of plaintext without markup out there. I have a good start on software to do this, but that is Plan B at this point. That there is nothing off the shelf for this is hard to fathom. – Chris Cochran Apr 03 '12 at 21:44
  • The problem is that your formatting rules are ad-hoc, and aren't standard. PERL will solve your ambiguous format issues, that is kinda the answer to this class of problem. You could also look into latex, but html might solve your problem just as well. – Adam Shiemke Apr 03 '12 at 22:11
  • Your solutions imply a manual reformatting of the entire document--a space where I have many uninteresting choices. Markdown offers a better direction, where the plaintext document would require much less modification, and remain readable upon completion. I am looking into that more. – Chris Cochran Apr 03 '12 at 23:41

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