On Thu, Feb 27, 2014 at 2:36 PM, Richard Heck <rgh...@lyx.org> wrote: > On 02/27/2014 01:29 PM, stefano franchi wrote: >> >> >> >> >> >> I'd like to hear other people's opinions on this. Here is what I think: >> >> - Bibliography support with suitable styles is a must. This feature is as >> crucial to someone working in the Humanities, as math support is for someone >> working in the sciences. With the difference that scientists can often avoid >> conversion to Word, while Humanists just can't. > > > Perhaps it would help to distinguish two projects: (i) Round-trip, for > collaboration; (ii) Export, for sending to a publisher, or whatever. If we > don't want to lose data, then we presumably have to save bibliographic info > as metadata we can reread on import. But if we're only exporting, then we > can either use ODT's bibliography support, e.g., or do the kind of thing we > do with XHTML. >
Good point. So here is an idea that may combine the two projects while keeping them separate, and perhaps alleviate, somehow, Rob's (justified) concerns about depending on too many external tools: How about we choose the markdown format used by pandoc (or the similar but slightly different MMD-4) as the intermediate target of both the Lyx to Word and Word to Lyx converters? That way we could start working on a lyx2mmd(-4) module that could be leveraged by pandoc for the final output to word/odt and by a mmd2word/odt module that we could subsequently write. Same for the reverse translation. This approach adds some (perhaps significant) overhead of course. For once, the complete solution would involve modules for lyx2mmd, mmd2lyx, and word2mmd. But it would also give us a fixed target, pretty much in the same sense in which a XML could. Besides, mmd stores math in native latex format. As far as I can tell, MMD supports metadata, so Lyx-only information could be transported across conversions. S. -- __________________________________________________ Stefano Franchi Associate Research Professor Department of Hispanic Studies Ph: +1 (979) 845-2125 Texas A&M University Fax: +1 (979) 845-6421 College Station, Texas, USA stef...@tamu.edu http://stefano.cleinias.org
