I started the XML in 2007, with a couple of entries migrated from the “text table” file. And now in 2014 there are still far too many entries in the “text table” file, that is obnoxious. But actually I should have expected that.
Having both files in parallel makes me every so often look for an entry in both files in turn, and that is sooooooo bad.
Right, the “text table” file is rather nice to deal with in Emacs table-mode, but even simply copying from there (in just table-mode) leaves the buffer as “changed”, and I always have to make it look “undone”.
It is just so much nicer to have just one file, and that is in XML, and I can use nXML (within Emacs) to deal with it.
I even have a Perl script to assist me with the migration, but then … – I started the bad habit of having multi-line text fields, that obviously do not translate easily into that XML format, because field lines, that look aligned and corrsponding do not really correspond, so you do have to do something with them.
I think I should just convert the next entries I am going to look up, assuming they are the ones I need most often.