This is a wonderful little program by Chris Dorsey, our programming expert.
Let's hear a round of applause for his generosity!

Geof.
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A number of items have been posted about importing ASCII text in PageMaker. I
used PM 4.0 for Windows for a large (800 page) manual. Most of the text was
written by software engineers, using plain text editors. We established the
following process:

1.   I defined a set of styles, and thus style tags, to be used.

2.   The engineers wrote their sections in ASCII text with a style tag at the
start of each paragraph.

3.   I wrote a program called PMTAGS  that read their text file and
checked for valid style tags and, optionally, generated an output file
without all the CRLFs at the end of every line. So a file that looks like:

<para>This is a paragraph[CRLF]
in an ASCII text file.[CRLF]

<para>And this is[CRLF]
another.

becomes:

<para>This is a paragraph in an ASCII text file.[CRLF]
<para>And this is another.[CRLF]

This solved almost all the problems we had importing ASCII text into PM. The
program is configurable in that a file listing the style names is read at
startup, and this configuration file can specify some basic checks to make.

I hereby place this software in the public domain to be distributed and
used free of charge. I will mail a copy of the executable, documentation and
an example configuration file to anyone who is interested. Alternatively, if
there is someone with an anonymus FTP site, I am happy for the application to
be uploaded.
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 Dr Chris Dorsey                    Documentation Editor
 Network Engineering Team
 Industrial Research Limited        Telephone: +64 (04) 569-0000 xt4675
 Box 31-310, Lower Hutt,            Facsimile: +64 (04) 569-0067
 NEW ZEALAND.                       E-mail: c.dorsey@irl.cri.nz
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