Yeah, Atex was pretty much the way to go. When we moved from static HTML to dynamic content (Oracle) my first project was capturing the day's stories and converting them a form we could use. I had to figure out what all the typographic codes were and what they meant and then convert them plain text and HTML tags.
It was just crazy that as late as 2000 those systems were being crated up and shipped off to be used by another paper.
