[OS X TeX] Preparing large non-tex text for use in latex

[Bobby Cheren]

I am working on writing a casebook with a law professor. This involves lots
and lots of text in the form of cases and articles. This process reveals how
achingly painful it is to prep text for use in TeX by adjusting quotation
marks, adding \ in fron to $ and &, and replacing section symbols with \S \.
Has anyone built utility for cleaning/preparing text? I wrote the following
sed code that seems to get the job done:

s/‘/'/g
s/'\([a-z]\)/`\1/g
s/'\([A-Z]\)/`\1/g

s/“/"/g
s/”/"/g
s/"/''/g
s/''\([a-z]\)/``\1/g
s/''\([A-Z]\)/``\1/g

s/```/``\\,`/g
s/'''/'\\,''/g

s/§/ \\S \\ /g
s/&/\\&/g
s/\$/\\\$/g

I downloaded the texhelpers sed gui and set this to the default command. The
process now requires I create a file, put it in a sed input folder, and then
retrieve the text from the file created in the sed output folder. Not
exactly a clean process.

Any thoughts out there on this issue? The ability to batch prepare text
would make tasks like LaTeX-ing public domain books and law cases easy.


-- 
the tide is coming in...
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