1. Prerequisites

• Employing this procedure requires that the XML document be already formatted with desirable indentations and breakup into the desired flow of lines.  If the XML document is not in that form, it should be subject to XML indentation procedures available with a variety of text editors.  Use that form in subsequent operations.  Also, if indentations are with the use of tab characters, they should be consistently used for that purpose throughout the XML document.  The layout must already be systematic, either by replacing all tabs with correct runs of space characters or by leaving the tabs to be adjusted in the following steps.
    
• The procedure requires a copy of the XML document, with indentation and separation into multiple lines, to be renamed as a *.txt file.  This can be accomplished by taking the copy that is the origin of the annotation replica and simply adding a ".txt" suffix to its file name.
    
  The .txt extension inhibits treating of the file as XML, instead treating it as plaintext despite what other associations might apply to the naming of the XML document.
    
• In addition to Excel, used here, it is important to have a text editor that will display the .txt-named file in the correct layout before the replica is derived.  This is important for verifying replication of the indentations of material in the XML document.

2. Importing into Excel

• Using a File Explorer, right click on the name of the .txt-suffixed file and select "Open with ".  If Excel is not already in the list for opening of text files, establish that option by following the "choose default option ... ".  When the Excel program is found and selected, do not select it as the new default.  It will now be available as an "Open with " choice in the future without having to be the default.
    
    
    
• When the text document opens as an Excel spreadsheet, each line of the text document becomes a row in the spreadsheet.  In addition, the indentation with tabs observed in the original text document are used as a means to determine how many cells (columns) to move over before starting the indented text.  Each tab at the beginning of a line will cause Excel to skip one column before the cell that receives the remaining un-tabbed text. 
    
    
       
  This detection of tab-induced indentation alignments will be exploited once a few preliminaries are completed.
     
• If the XML document has no tab codes and all indentation is with space characters, the lines will already be formatted correctly and the procedure in Section 5 is simplified accordingly (all XML document lines then imported into column A, with leading spaces, regardless of how much indentation there is).  Note: Depending on the default font of the spreadsheet, it might appear that indentation is not preserved properly.  This can be checked by switching to a fixed-pitch font, as described in Section 4, below.
    
• Loading into Excel in this manner will lead to replacement of tab (HT) codes by appropriate numbers of space characters.  Platform-correct (i.e., CR-LF) line breaks are also produced.  An alternative is to accomplish that by other means.  A spreadsheet program can still be useful for subsequent introduction of the line numberings.
      

3. Adding Line Numbers

• It is important to add the line numbers before anything else.  This is accomplished by addition of two columns to the left of the initial column A
    
    
    
  After the first new column A is inserted, just do it once more, so there are now empty columns A and B, with the original material now starting in column C.
    
• In the new cell A1, simply enter the decimal number, "1".  Then specify custom cell formatting to have the line number always have a fixed number of digits, with leading zeroes.  In the example, 4 digits are more than enough.  Sometimes 5 or more digits may be required.  This can be determined by seeing what the number of the last-imported row is.
     
    
     
• After the formatting is applied, place the formula "=a1+1" in cell A2.
     
    
• Now select cell A2 (which now has "0002" in it), and select all of the lower cells in column A down to the last line of the XML document.  Use the "Fill Down" operation to ripple the line numbering all the way to that lowest cell.
    
    
    
  All of the content employed in making a line-numbered plaintext baseline replica is now in place. 

4. Setting a Fixed-Pitch Font

• Select the entire spreadsheet by clicking the pointer in the corner to the left of the column labels (and above the spreadsheet row labels).  Then choose a fixed-pitch font that provides a condensed but readable appearance.
    
    
       
• The chosen font can be either a serif or sans-serif font.  Courier New is selected here because it is widely available.  The font itself is not so important.   It is critical for what follows that the characters in the font be of a fixed width.
    

5. Correcting the Spacing and Indentation of Text

It is desirable to remove unnecessary spacing in the line-number column and in the empty column between the line numbers and the imported text.  In addition, controlling the width of the empty cells that reflect tabbed indentations of the original file is useful.  In the illustration, the tabs introduce columns that are essentially 8 characters wide.  These can be reduced to a more-compact width by manipulating the spreadsheet columns.

• The easy way to remove all extra spaces from the line-number columns is as follows.  Place the cursor on the vertical line between the A and B column labels.  When it turns into a double-headed arrow, double click.   This will cause the column to the left (A in this case) to be shrunk to exactly contain the line numbers.
    
• To accomplish the same thing with column B, it is necessary to put date in one of the cells.  For example, insert a single space character in cell B1.  To ensure that exactly one text space is introduced, enter "' " (a quote followed by exactly one space) into the cell.  Then double click on the separator between column label B and column label C.
    
    
          
• For the example XML document, the automatically-determined cell widths starting with column C are too wide and lead to too much indentation of material that starts in later columns (D, E, F, etc.).   Starting with column C, the column width can be reduced (or expanded were that needed) by moving the marker between the column C label and the column D label.
     
    
    
  The amount of indentation is determined by noticing where the lines starting in Column D of the spreadsheet align beneath the lines starting in Column C in the original document when viewed with desirable interpretations for the number of spaces each tab represents.  Note: If there were no tabs, or they were eliminated before import into the spreadsheet, the correction described here is not available.
    
• The process of reducing columns continues from left to right.  For example, Column D is reduced so that lines that are indented to Column E align properly beneath the Column D text above/below them.  In this case, indentations of 4 spaces seem to be nicely consistent for successive levels of indentation.
    
    
    
• The column shrinkage continues until there are no lines that are indented into a farther column.  In the illustrated case, there were no indentations farther than the beginning of column G.
    
    
    
  When the adjustment of indentation is complete, it remains to save the work and confirm that a correct plaintext baseline document is produced.
    

6. Saving and Verifying the Work

• It is now important to save the Excel workbook in its current state. This file is needed if any corrections are required.  This file is also the starting-point for derivation of an HTML replica for annotation as a hypertext document.  For now, just save it in a memorable location.  (The spreadsheet used for illustration here is preserved at [n140504d2].
    
• To save a plaintext version of the spreadsheet with the exact format appearance, the spreadsheet is now to be saved as a "Formatted Text (Space delimited) (*.prn)" file. 
    
    
    
  If the file is given a .prn extension even though you've specified .txt, simply strip the .prn from the file name or replace it with .txt, as appropriate.
    
• There are now two files.  The Excel workbook was used to add the line numbers and clean up indentation.  The saved "Formatted Text" form is a text file that is designed for direct printing as an plaintext file. 
    
• The plaintext file can now be reviewed by comparison with the original XML document (as made into a .txt file) to confirm that the replica has fidelity with the XML document.

7. References

[n140504b3]

OASIS Open.  Open Document v1.2 Manifest Schema.  Part of OpenDocument Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) Version 1.2.  29 September 2011 OASIS Standard.  Schema file OpenDocument-v1.2-os-manifest-schema.rng dated 2011-09-29 is available at <http://docs.oasis-open.org/office/v1.2/os/>.  The version used simply has .txt added to the end of the file name, with no other modifications.
  

[n140504d1]

Hamilton, Dennis E.  Open Document v1.2 Manifest Schema plaintext replica.  Derived from n140504d2 on 2014-05-11.  This is an exact replica with a line-numbering column at the beginning of each of the original 224 lines.
   

[n140504d2]

Hamilton, Dennis E.  Open Document v1.2 Manifest Schema plaintext replica spreadsheet.  Derived from n140504b3 on 2014-05-11.  This Microsoft Office 2013 Excel spreadsheet is the edited form from which n140504d1 was produced

   

Attribution:

Hamilton, Dennis E.

Annotating XML Documents: Create Baseline Plaintext Replicas.  nfoWorks devNote page d140502d 0.04 June, 2014.  Accessed at <http://nfoWorks.org/dev/2014/05/d140502d.htm>.

Revision History:

0.04 2015-06-01-10:04 Improve Indentation Explanations

The text is adjusted to make the handling of indented lines in the presence/absence of tab characters more explicit.

0.03 2014-05-31-08:41 Reflect NL and TAB use in chosen illustration

The appearance of NL line separations is noteworthy; also, the use of tabs in the schema for indenting is a factor in what happens with the import into Excel.  There are other touch-ups.

0.02 2014-05-12-14:27 Motivate the Manual Procedure

Using a script or small program can be simpler.  This essentially-manual version does provide demonstration of the essentials, although correction of indentations is likely a peculiarity from using Excel.

0.01 2014-05-11-20:30 Document the Procedure

The procedure for using Microsoft Office 2013 Excel to create a spreadsheet with numbered lines and the same layout as the XML document is demonstrated.  The extraction of a clean text file with the same appearance is then accomplished.

0.00 2014-05-11-17:55 Initial Placeholder

Provide initial placeholder content for sketching an approach for creating baseline plaintext replicas.