On 01/30/2013 05:13 PM, Idris Samawi Hamid ادريس سماوي حامد wrote:
But in general odt is too much of a mess for my limited skills. And although Bill does not "like it in the least" I am not aware of a better cross-format solution than markdown/pandoc whenever I am forced to deal with M$-Word workflows and ConTeXt in my own writing.
Everybody has their own preferences. As one-time net.god Henry Spencer put it, "The nice thing about standards is there are so many of them."
If I can go out on a limb: What Bill seems to want is a general WYSIWYG->ConTeXt solution. Generalizing Thomas's remark, I'm not sure that the word-processor paradigm is appropriate for such a thing (unless one is very disciplined in using the word processor). But a WYSIWYG structured layout processor like Framemaker (is there some free imitation out there?) may output xml that is more regular, predictable, and easier to map to ConTeXt than any M$-Word imitation.
Scribus (~InDesign) has an XML-based format, too but no direct conversion to M$-word. Doesn't look all that bad to me but I'm hardly an XML expert. At least it's free (beer and freedom). Sigil works directly on epub2 (XHTML+) but doesn't support epub3 (XHTML++) yet. TEI tools can convert odt -> XHTML, epub2 epub3 and several others including LaTeX but not ConTeXt. How successfully is another question. I write fiction with an occasional stab at poetry (mostly as part of a fictional work) not academic papers so my considerations are somewhat different. The content and theme often require different typography and formatting on an individual book basis. (See Bringhurst) Sadly (and I really mean that) there are a couple of ebook publishers who /insist/ on submissions being in M$-Word format and then they will do the conversions to mobi, epub, fb2 and pdf themselves even if I can do a better job. Plus, most of my writer friends work in word processors which means that it is far easier to exchange manuscripts for proofing & feedback is via the (ugh) .doc file.
Best wishes Idris
-- Bill Meahan Westland, Michigan USA