README for mel2wp - Mellel to WordPress conversion assistant
Shane Landrum <[email protected]>
Last updated January 22, 2010
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Footnotes and endnotes are essential to scholarly publishing as a way to
acknowledge our debt to other researchers. They're common in print
publications, and in humanities fields they're often full of commentary
and side points to the main argument.

For my WordPress blog, I use the FD Footnotes plugin 
(http://flagrantdisregard.com/footnotes-plugin/), which generates nice
little hyperlinked endnotes. Using it, text formatted like [1. This is a
footnote] get a little superscript footnote number in the text, and the
footnote itself shows up at the bottom of the post.

FD Footnotes works well if you're writing the original draft of a post
in WordPress, but not so well if you're trying to publish a paper that
you originally wrote in a word processor. I use Mellel
(www.redlers.com), which works more reliably for me on OS X than Word
does.

This script is a little hack to make it easier to convert scholarly
papers written with Mellel (www.redlers.com) into a format that will
post nicely on a WordPress blog.

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CAVEATS:

This is an *alpha* version, but it's better than nothing. It's been 
tested on OS X Leopard only. Use at your own risk. Read the 
bugs-and-limitations list below to avoid getting your hopes up.

You'll need to be familiar with command-line interactions in Terminal to
use this version.

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USAGE:

- Make sure your blog has the FD Footnotes plugin installed.

- Start Mellel, and make sure your document's footnotes are rendered as
endnotes.

- Select all of the Mellel document (Cmd-A) and copy it to the
clipboard.

- Open a text editor, paste the selected text in, and save it in a
convenient location. (Your endnote markers should show up in the body
text surrounded by 2 asterisks, with the corresponding note text at the
end of the file.)

- If your file is named input.txt, invoke mel2wp like this:

  mel2wp.pl input.txt >output.txt

Once you've done that, output.txt should contain a better-footnoted
version of your text.

- Open output.txt in a text editor; select all the text; copy it to the
clipboard.

- Open a browser, start a new post in WordPress, and click on the "paste
text" button in the visual editor (next to the "paste from Word"
button). Paste in the clipboard text.

- Save your draft post. Revise as necessary to get the formatting right.

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KNOWN BUGS, LIMITATIONS, WISHES:

- The process of copying from Mellel to text clobbers all italics,
boldface, and inserted graphics. (There's probably a way to use an RTF
export from Mellel instead, but I haven't time to figure that out.
If you do, let me know.)

- If your footnotes contain square brackets, FD Footnotes won't display
them correctly. This is a problem with FD Footnotes, strictly speaking,
but researchers who use Chicago footnote styles should be aware of it.
For now, I work around it by turning all square brackets to parentheses
before I feed my documents through this script. If you'd like to work 
with the FD Footnotes author to come up with a better solution, please
do.

- I'd love to have an Applescript wrapper for this so that people who 
don't understand the shell can use it.

- A demo script with sample input/output files would be nice, as would
a testing script for developers.