How do I use awk split file to multiline records? - awk

Question

On OSX, I've converted a Powerpoint deck to ASCII text, and now want to process this with awk.
I want to split the file into multiline records corresponding to slides in the deck.
Treating any line beginning with a capital latin letter provides a good approximation, but I can't figure out doing this in awk.
I've tried resetting the record separator, RS = "\n^[A-Z]" and RS = "\n^[[:alnum:]][[:upper:]]", and various permutations, but none differentiate. That is, awk keeps treating each individual as a record, rather than grouping them as I want.
The cleaned text looks like this:
Welcome
++ Class will focus on:
– Basics of SQL syntax
– SQL concepts analogous to Excel concepts
Who Am I
++ Self-taught on LAMP(ython) stack
++ Plus some DNS, bash scripting, XML / XSLT
++ Prior professional experience:
– Office of Management and Budget
– Investment banking (JP Morgan, UBS, boutique)
– MBA, University of Chicago
Roadmap
+ Preliminaries
+ What is SQL
+ Excel vs SQL
+ Moving data from Excel to SQL and back
+ Query syntax basics
- Running queries
- Filtering, grouping
- Functions
- Combining tables
+ Using queries for analysis
Some 'slides' have blank lines, some don't.
Once past these hurdles I plan to wrap each record in an tag for use in deck.js. But getting the record definitions right is killing me.
How do I do those things?
EDIT: The question initially asked also about converting Unicode bullet characters to ASCII, but I've figured that out. Some remarks in comments focus on that stuff.

Answer 1

In awk you could try to collect records using:
/^[[:upper:]]/ {
if (r>0) print rec
r=1; rec=$0 RS; next
}
{
rec=rec $0 RS
}
END {
print rec
}
To remove bullets you could use
gsub (/•/,"++",rec)

Answer 2

You might try using the "textutil" utility built into OSX to convert the file within a script to save you doing it all by hand. Try typing the following into Terminal window and pressing to move to the next page:
man textutil
Once you have got some converted text, try posting that so people can see what the inputs look like, then maybe someone can help you split it up how you want.