I used to convert Canadian federal government reports from PDF to HTML. Bilingual reports. The entity conversion is useful, but only does 1/3rd the job.

The French reports have to conform to the same line-wrap rules in HTML as on paper. Which means inserting lots of nbsp. Numbers, honorifics, names of departments, names of pieces of legislation... And ULs have to be formatted in a certain way, and I am not allowed to do new CSS because the CSS is designed by committee, so I have to fake it with brs. And so on.

So, I gradually accumulated a massive search-replace Applescript that does about 80% of the work. I used to do this by hand and would literally spend 30% of my time (once, 2 days straight) just formatting the damn French grammar. Sure, I _could_ script other applications, but given my level of scripting awareness (and that I don't want more awareness than I have) I'm very happy with BBEdit.