Why is it so hard to get people to use styles? I worked recently with a
friend to convert his Word document into an ePub. My advice is don't ever,
ever do this! Even though I had advocated the use of styles, he had spent
hours using direct formatting.
And it is not just amateurs. I write for a service that insists on using
Word documents (who knows why?) and the stuff they send me is all direct
formatting.
I know that this is preaching to the choir here, but I wondered if anyone
had a strategy that convinced others to work with styles.
Cheers,
Alan
On Fri, 8 Oct 2021 at 12:21, Virgil Arrington <cuyfa...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 10/7/2021 2:50 PM, Dr Eberhard Lisse wrote:
> > Virgil,
> >
> > how could that work in ANY program ("dorward" compatibility)?
> >
> > But it's Open Source, just pull the latest version once out of beta.
>
> No doubt that is an easy solution with FOSS. But I recall a time when I
> once upgraded LyX on my Linux box without thinking of my Windows
> computer, for which upgraded LyX binaries were not yet available. For a
> few days, I had some compatibility issues between the two LyX versions
> on my computers.
>
> In a different context, file compatibility was the original issue in
> this thread. Osman had asked how to convert his LibreOffice letterhead
> to LyX format. Both you and Steve (wisely I believe) advised him against
> trying. LibreOffice and LyX are just two very different systems with
> different workflows and ways of getting tasks done.
>
> But, then Steve went one step further and shared his horror story trying
> to translate his book from Word to LibreOffice. From his experience, he
> concluded that LibreOffice doesn't work well with large documents with
> styles. That piqued my interest as I have never had any problem with
> LibreOffice's styles regardless of the size of the document.
>
> In fact, several years ago, I wanted my Business Ethics students to read
> and write a book report on Charles Sheldon's classic novel, In His
> Steps. Since the book is in the public domain, I thought I would save my
> students some money and provide them with free copies of the book. I
> downloaded a plain text version of the book and loaded it into
> LibreOffice. From there, I formatted the book using my pre-defined
> paragraph, page, and character styles. It came to 188 pages and
> LibreOffice handled it with ease. My styles didn't magically change on
> me. To be fair, as a novel, the formatting was very straightforward with
> no tables, charts, and only a couple footnotes. The most involved part
> was the table of contents.
>
> Once I got it completed in LibreOffice, I exported it into various file
> formats to meet my students' different needs. I exported it as a .DOC,
> .DOCX, .XHTML, .PDF, .EPUB, and Kindle MOBI. The first five formats I
> achieved with LibreOffice's export function. To get the MOBI file, I
> used Calibre. Everything went smooth as silk in all of the formats.
>
> I could be wrong, but I think the difference between my experience and
> Steve's is that I started with unformatted text whereas I assume he
> started with a formatted Word document. Over the decades I have learned
> that formatted documents created with different programs just don't like
> being altered by another program. For this reason, when I practiced law,
> I had my office computer installed with Word, WordPerfect, LibreOffice,
> and Atlantis. If I were collaborating with another colleague, I just
> used whatever program they used. Regardless of the program I used,
> nearly every time I tried to edit a non-native document, I ran into
> problems. It was exacerbated by the fact that usually, my colleagues
> used direct formatting rather than styles and that always created a hot
> mess. I learned to not expect a document created in Word with a
> combination of styles and direct formatting to work smoothly in
> LibreOffice with its own interpretation of styles (or WordPerfect, or
> AbiWord, or Atlantis, or LyX or whatever).
>
> All this to say that I find that LyX and LibreOffice are both very good
> programs and both can create very large documents without collapsing. I
> have gotten excellent results with both (as long as I remember to
> properly word my Google search for LaTeX guidance ;)
>
> Virgil
>
>
>
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>
--
Alan L Tyree http://www2.austlii.edu.au/~alan
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