On 05/01/2013 10:59 PM, Jerry wrote:
On May 1, 2013, at 5:21 AM, ehud.kaplan wrote:
I had tried to convert from a Lyx document (a Ph.D. thesis, ~140 pages) to
LibreOffice (File/Export/HTML). Much of it worked, but there were many
problems:
• Equation numbers moved from right to left
• Figures were totally distorted (size scaled up),
• Some equations and algorithms were mangled
• Several sections appeared centered instead of being left justified as
they were originally.
Using File/Export/LYXHTML produced similar results, although the equation
numbers were not mangled.
In short, such conversions do a lot, but they also leave a lot for manual
fixing. I suspect that if such a path were available, many more people would
use Lyx.
I agree, as do many others.
A while back I spent a lot of time evaluating the various ways to convert LyX
to .odt or .docx and found that none of them work well. (Apologies to those who
are reading this who have actually worked on the problem and made substantial
progress.) Some work with certain restricted sets of features but add an
equation or something else and they break.
One would hope with all the talk on the developers' list recently with the
Google Summer of Code that this would be at the top of the list of things to do.
I am somewhat confused about this. I see the need to convert a TeX
document, or by extension a LyX file, to (or from) Word format to be an
occasional thing, necessitated by some journal insisting on Word, or a
collaborator who can't work with anything else. I don't see this as
something worth the large amount of effort to make into a single
button-push. For one thing, that would probably be unfeasible even in
the short term, and since the latest Word formats are a moving target it
would require significant maintenance even if it were possible.
I coauthored a paper that my collaborator typed, in Word. Not only
could I not translate that to something I could read --- Ooffice at the
time could not read the equations he had done in Word, but the journal
actually re-typeset the whole thing in LaTeX in order to print it.
I would not expect to be able to effortlessly convert a 140-page thesis
from Word *.docx to html. Can Word itself really do that in a way that
does not mangle equations?
--
David L. Johnson
Department of Mathematics
Lehigh University
