Hi Bill,
I will jump in here after I have been following this thread.
There is a more direct method that you can use though at first it requires some work.
Then again, it might not work if the formatting used is quite complex.
A long while ago I had to join several Word documents to form a book and output as
a pdf for the publisher.
As usual with all collaborative work in acedemica, nobody followed the guide lines.
Word choked on putting such a large document together. A real mess! So, I decided
to convert every thing to LaTeX. I wrote a few Word macros that converted the
quotation marks to commands, converted the footnotes to LaTeX commands,
translate the öäß, etc to LATeX, and the Word-formating to LaTeX- Commands
environments of my own liking (names).
Saved the documents as standard text file. In LaTeX I set up the environments as I
needed then.
This work flow work quite well.
regards
Keith.
Am 30.01.2013 um 20:31 schrieb Bill Meahan
I scoured the wiki and mailing-list without finding a definite answer. The most recent discussion I can find is from 2006 and at that time it was "possible" but nobody had yet developed the appropriate template, XSLT style-sheet, module or whatever to actually do it.
For a number of reasons (including an absolute necessity to produce MS compatible .doc files) I need to maintain and write documents using LibreOffice Writer (or OO.org Writer) but the quality of the PDF files is, shall we say, not satisfactory. Exporting to LaTeX 2e is possible (and standard equipment in LO-W) but after using both for a while now, I vastly prefer ConTeXt. I could probably use something like the TEI tools to transform the ODT file to XHTML or TEI p5 and process that but I've found over many years such intermediate transformations have a lot of problems of their own.
I don't need math support for /my/ work but I am sure others who do need it would like to follow the same route to great PDFs.
Any solutions?