[Tfug] Lightweight markup languages?

[Claude Rubinson]

On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 06:27:47PM -0500, JD Rogers wrote:
> The more I use OOo, the less I like it. I think the team has done a
> wonderful job of making a word clone which comes complete with all the
> pain and suffering associated with using word. So far, it seems like
> my only option though.

Agreed.  If they would just let me use Emacs keybindings, I'd be much
happier with it.  I tried KWord for a while--which is more Unixy--and
it's not bad.  But the learning curve is significant enough that I
haven't been able to move over completely.   Really, what I need is a
(a) a Word viewer and (b) a solid X2Doc converter.  OOo serves those
purposes reasonably well.

> One option that I have convinced some of my coauthors to use is to
> send the the PDF from latex and the newest version acrobat (even the
> free version) allows one to add comments. I ask my colleagues to write
> the're suggestions and changes as comments on the pdf and return it to
> me to incorporate into the document. This may not work well for bigger
> docs and larger contribution from others though.

Most of my colleagues seem to have the full version of Acrobat, so
comments tend not to be much a problem.  It's the collaboration.  But
it's great to know that even the free version of Acrobat Reader now
has commenting.

> > For more complex pieces, I write in LaTeX and do a LaTeX -> HTML ->
> > OOo -> DOC conversion.  A bit hairy but seems to work.  (ht4tex
> > provides a LaTeX -> ODF script but it no longer works, which is a
> > shame.)
> 
> Interesting, I had never tried that.. I just did it with my paper, and
> latex2html seems to png-ify the equations which is fine except when
> you have inline variables. It also seems to choke on EPS images.
> *shrug*, might be nice for some docs.

latex2html is crap.  No, that's too harsh.  Better to say that it's
only good for relatively simple documents.  What you want to use is
tex4ht.  I've been pretty happy with it (it can convert LaTeX
footnotes into footnotes or endnotes!) but it suffers from poor
documentation.  It also includes a number of wrapper scripts.  To
convert to HTML, I believe the command is "htlatex".  There are other
such scripts including, as I mentioned, "oolatex" (which,
unfortunately, no longer seems to work).

I always use EPS files for graphics and haven't had any problems with
tex4ht.

> So allow me to rant a moment:
> I just submitted a paper using the _publisher_provided_ latex
> template. Turns out, their template produces a document that does not
> conform to the submission requirements. Then, after working around
> those issues and jumping through bibtex hoops, it got to typsetting.
> 
> I have no idea what commercial stuff (maybe framemaker?) they use for
> typsetting, but my document looked 'pretty', and what I got back was..
> well, a steaming pile. Equations were completely mangled. I wrote in
> to ask what went wrong and, get this, the editor said they copy edit
> using _hard_copy_!!!! My coauthor just shook his head and said "you're
> doing it wrong" as in http://xkcd.com/463 .

That's pretty great.  I'm in the process of finishing up a paper for
ACM's SIGMOD and the journal uses a style identical to the SIGMOD
conference "but with a larger font."  The journal links you to the ACM
templates--which explicitly prevent you from using larger font
sizes. So that's not terribly useful.  I fished around for a bit and
eventually found another ACM SIG's template that I could use.

> He did mention they are getting more and more submission in latex
> though. I'm kind of surprised by that comment as, sadly, I would
> have almost expected the opposite trend.

In the social sciences, they pretty much just use Word for everything
(i.e., entire journals and books) which is absurd.  But it does seem
that there's some movement toward LaTeX.  Offhand, I don't recall
which journal it was but I recently noticed that one of the major
Sociology journals now accepts LaTeX format.  (I think it said
something like, "We will accept LaTeX but would prefer Word.)

Claude