Re: [NTG-context] Typesetting LibreOffice (ODT) documents with ConTeXt

On 30/01/13 20:45, Idris Samawi Hamid ادريس سماوي حامد wrote:

Hi Bill,

On Wed, 30 Jan 2013 12:31:51 -0700, Bill Meahan wrote:

...

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.

Have you considered using markdown/pandoc? You can either

pandoc would be the perfect tool for this purpose (one [extended markdown] source to generate them all), but it has some shortcomings. The most important limitation is that it doesn't allow language tagging. This isn't a problem if you don't mix languages (or you don't mind them wrong hyphenated). Another important issue is that pandoc is not able to mark blocks (or text spans) with identifiers or classes. In my opinion, these are the two most important issues that render pandoc a less-than-perfect tool to generate documents in different formats from a single source. Just in case it helps, Pablo -- http://www.ousia.tk