We have marked up finding aids from a variety of formats: Word and WordPerfect documents, our Inmagic database exported in ASCII text, and SGML files created from scratch.  We've tried different ways to automate the procedure but have yet to find one best way.  We do use a PERL program created by Alvin Pollock to create an HTML version of our SGML finding aid, and it's a wonderful program.  We currently don't have a search engine or other indexing retrieval method but are marking up our finding aids with the future in mind. We use Panorama's Author/Editor for markup, offer Panorama Free and the HTML versions for delivery methods.  We like Author/Editor for the most part.