On 01/30/2013 02:45 PM, Idris Samawi Hamid ادريس سماوي حامد wrote:

Have you considered using markdown/pandoc? You can either

I appreciate the suggestion but it does not meet my needs. I currently use GNU Emacs and YASnippet. All my work-to-date is already in raw context which YASnippet and my snippet collection makes easier than Markdown. TEA and TextAdept and SCIte provided similar functionality. I am familiar with Markdown and don't like it in the least. Markup (whether Markdown, (X)HTML, textile, raw context or whatever) is still 1970's-style processing (we did roff/nroff/troff in those days). Part of the objective is to get away from plain-text + markup so I (and the other users) can get near-WYSIWYG processing and preview the documents as they are written. No doubt some fine-tuning would be required with a direct-to-ConTeXt method but it still has other advantages. Including making it possible for my wife to use it. :) She was an excellent social worker but her computer skills are quite wanting even after many years of my tutelage. An XSLT stylesheet would allow direct export of a document from LO-W which could then be be tweaked if necessary. -- Bill Meahan Westland, Michigan USA

Am 30.01.2013 um 22:12 schrieb Aditya Mahajan :

On Wed, 30 Jan 2013, Bill Meahan wrote:

...

An XSLT stylesheet would allow direct export of a document from LO-W which could then be be tweaked if necessary.

Another option is to uncompress the odt file (IIUC, it is just a zip), and process it directly in ConTeXt (http://www.pragma-ade.com/general/manuals/xml-mkiv.pdf).

ConTeXt is able to read from zip files.

This approach is more flexible than XSLT stylesheets, but it ties you to ConTeXt (with XSLT, in principle, you can switch to other formats relatively easily).

In essence it boils down to understanding the ODT XML Schema and figuring out the mapping to context commands.

Hans posted a simple example to process odt files a few years ago. Wolfgang

On 01/30/2013 10:12 PM, Aditya Mahajan wrote:

On Wed, 30 Jan 2013, Bill Meahan wrote:

...

An XSLT stylesheet would allow direct export of a document from LO-W which could then be be tweaked if necessary.

Another option is to uncompress the odt file (IIUC, it is just a zip), and process it directly in ConTeXt (http://www.pragma-ade.com/general/manuals/xml-mkiv.pdf).

This approach is more flexible than XSLT stylesheets, but it ties you to ConTeXt (with XSLT, in principle, you can switch to other formats relatively easily).

In essence it boils down to understanding the ODT XML Schema and figuring out the mapping to context commands.

I am no expert here, but I have tried this approach a while ago when I was typesetting an edited volume. The authors sent me MS Word files, which I saved as OOO. But the xml in open office was just too messy to deal with. It doesn't provide logical structure, but tries to recreate the visual output, so you get dozens of different <span type="this"> and <span type="that"> elements which may be completely irrelevant. And whenever I thought I had figured out what some cryptic abbreviation (say, <span font="T6">) meant ("italic"), I then learnt that in the next document I opened, it may mean something completely different. I would be interested in finding a fully automated work flow, but I'm somewhat sceptical that it exists. And don't even think about round-trip conversion, I don't think this will be possible. Just my 2 cents. Thomas

On Wed, 30 Jan 2013, Idris Samawi Hamid ادريس سماوي حامد wrote:

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.

For a *simple* WYSIWYG solution, have a look at zim (http://zim-wiki.org/). It is a desktop wiki, but it has support for basic structure elements (headings, bold, italic, etc., lists, images, hyperlinks). It has a native text-based format, and exports to HTML/Markdown/ReST. So, if you do not need any fancy features (tables, footnotes, etc.), it may be a suitable WYSIWYG editor. I assume that the generated HTML is clean, and it should be easier to handle than ODT. Aditya

On Wed, 30 Jan 2013 18:54:49 -0500 Bill Meahan wrote:

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.

I have been able to teach some of my collaborators to exchange plain text. They mostly use MSWord as their editor. After one or two round trips in plain text format (.txt for them), they eventually learn to focus on content and forget about format. This is pretty easy with utf8 and ConTeXt as it is mostly readable text. One constraint, though, is to keep paragraphs to one very long line with no \n or \r. This is not a problem for me as I simply configure my editor to wrap its view (not the file). Alan

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

On 01/31/2013 04:19 AM, Keith J. Schultz wrote:

Hi Bill,

I will jump in here after I have been following this thread.

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.

Yeah, if all else fails I can always write a few Perl scripts. :) Before I retired, I wrote a LOT of Perl code that supplemented a huge corporate application in real time. Perl may not be the favored language these days but it gets the job done. :) I also edit (and report for and ...) an organizational newsletter. I use Scribus for that. Thanks for the input. -- Bill Meahan Westland, Michigan USA

On Sat, 9 Feb 2013, Bill Meahan wrote:

Aditya and Idris were sufficiently strong in their recommendation to use Markdown+pandoc for multi-format document production (including ConTeXt) I decided to take another look.

Sooner or later, you'll reach the limit of markdown. In those situations, I use gpp to preprocess the file. See http://randomdeterminism.wordpress.com/2012/06/01/how-i-stopped-worring-and-... Aditya

On Sat, 09 Feb 2013 09:51:46 -0700, Bill Meahan wrote:

What made the difference is a little editor, written entirely in Python so it is cross-platform, called ReText. It is less powerful than Emacs but has the advantage of almost-real-time preview of what the produced document will look like in plain HTML. It's not quite WYSIWYG but it _is_ the next best thing and satisfies my needs. You can find ReText at http://sourceforge.net/projects/retext/ As I said, it (should) work for Windows and Mac users but you must have WebKit installed for the preview feature. Mac users have it by default since Safari uses it. Actually, Apple wrote it. Of course, you need Python installed as well.

I never heard of retext before, so I spent some time with it... thanks for the reference! Unicode support seems solid, even bidi (via Qt). OTOH it's waaay too geeky for the average citizen to install -- too many steps (python, pyqt,...), have to search for your .conf file through a python interpreter and you still can't find it after that etc. Then in Windows it turns out to be an .ini file, not a .conf file! Then you have to make a .bat file to start it with a mouse click, etc. Now you previously mentioned working with colleagues etc. For Windows users MarkdownPad -- http://markdownpad.com/ -- has most of the same features as ReText (e.g. custom css) and is trivial to install. Best wishes Idris -- Professor Idris Samawi Hamid Department of Philosophy Colorado State University Fort Collins, CO 80523

On Sun, 10 Feb 2013 11:47:22 -0700, Bill Meahan wrote:

Glad you found something that works well.

Retext seems to have better support than MarkdownPad for some pandoc markdown extensions like footnotes: ======================== Here is a footnote reference,[^1] and another.[^longnote] [^1]: Here is the footnote. [^longnote]: Here's one with multiple blocks. Subsequent paragraphs are indented to show that they belong to the previous footnote. { some.code } The whole paragraph can be indented, or just the first line. In this way, multi-paragraph footnotes work like multi-paragraph list items. This paragraph won't be part of the note, because it isn't indented. ======================== In the html/live-preview Retext gives you a jumpback from the footnote to the original line... very nice. Best wishes Idris -- Professor Idris Samawi Hamid Department of Philosophy Colorado State University Fort Collins, CO 80523