On 11 June 2013 14:15, Rainer M Krug <rai...@krugs.de> wrote: > These are just ideas from my side, but to try to incorporate pandoc > into LyX in the same way as LaTeX is Incorporated, would make LyX even > more powerful then it is already now. >
I agree. In fact, I think this affects me more as an editor, where I have to collaborate with clients often with a format they're comfortable with. Recently I've been using pandoc markdown to write stuff and then outputting to Word, but the back and forth is really becoming annoying as the other way around is not a painless route. For a start, both RTF and DOC formats have some inherent issues. I took some time to briefly benchmark this and came to the conclusion that they're not really worth the effort. Try converting a simple RTF or DOC file with one section and some basic formatting (bold, italic). Abiword, OpenOffice, Ted -- all had problems. However, DOCX is a different story. I believe that if we define the simplest use case we are satisfied with we can come up with a good solution for DOCX, which is a (slightly) documented format (at least, better than RTF or DOC). Rob Oakes did some work on DOC [1] but it still involves a number of loops and caveats. You can also find some programmatic examples for writing DOCX on the web [2] and an HTML converter. [3] I wanted to survey the LyX and LaTeX community for some opinions on this, perhaps to get an idea as to the demand for some research into this area. The project would do some empirical comparisons of the workarounds and propose at most two or three solutions that work (integration with Pandoc, or converintg directly to a simpler and well-supported language). The emphasis would be on retaining as much semantic meaning as possible, across different levels of complexity, starting from the very basic. I am not aware of any similar academic or non-academic effort, but this could also be a long blog post. [1] http://blog.oak-tree.us/index.php/2010/05/14/msword-lyx-import [2] http://www.jackreichert.com/2012/11/09/how-to-convert-docx-to-html/ [3] http://www.textfixer.com/html/convert-word-to-html.php -- GPG/PGP ID: C0711BF1
