On Fri, 13 Jan 2017 22:48:51 +0000 Peter Flynn <pe...@silmaril.ie> wrote:
> On 01/13/2017 02:24 AM, pereira wrote: > > FWIW, I use Libreoffice whenever someone in the MS Windows world > > sends me a document in .doc or .docx format. So far I've had no > > problems with sending them back documents made by Libreoffice and > > exported into docx (which actually tends to shorten the file length > > compared to Libreoffice's native format). > > > > Still, I vastly prefer writing in TeX. > > Yes, I recommend LaTeX for formatting any large-scale or complex > document. It is hugely more reliable and powerful than any > wordprocessor, and has the advantages that it runs identically on any > platform, and that there is a huge support ecosystem of people using > it. It's also free software, in both senses of the phrase. > > (Actually, for writing and editing a complex book or thesis, I would > prefer XML, which can be transformed to LaTeX for formatting. But this > is still not easy, as the XML editors out there are designed for > experts, not for authors.) Hi Peter and periera, I have a germ of an idea for authoring documents in a write once, read everywhere format. Markdown is very limited, but what it does it does well, fast, and easy for the author to read without conversion on every glance (or that horror of horrors, WYSIWYG). I think I can add paragraph character styles, within the format of Markdown, with low-distraction tags. The result would be a Markdown doc that I could parse as XML (perhaps after an HTML to XML conversion), with the ability to incorporate any arbitrary character or paragraph style you want. Although this can't, by itself, handle book specialties such as footnotes and bibliographies, it can create (I assume) XHTML that can easily be converted to web, ePub, or LaTeX, with all appearance ruled by CSS or LaTeX stylesheets. I haven't done this yet, but it looks to me like a very realistic way to author the kind of books I write. SteveT Steve Litt December 2016 featured book: Rapid Learning for the 21st Century http://www.troubleshooters.com/rl21 -- xubuntu-users mailing list xubuntu-users@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/xubuntu-users
