[TriLUG] LaTeX revisited

[tomed at bellsouth.net]

So far, the utilities I've seen for conversion from MS to LaTeX attempt to
preserve the literal formatting of the source doc, which kind of defeats
the purpose of LaTeX, where you let it take care of the visual stuff.
With literal source doc formatting preserved, you end up with a lot 
of LaTeX spaghetti that's hard to edit.

It would be nice to find a conversion tool that simply writes structural
LaTeX. The closest thing I've found so far is catdoc. Marking up catdoc
is easier for me than dealing with all the stuff that wvLatex or writer2latex
produces.

At Thu, 8 Feb 2007 11:19:21 -0500,
Steve Litt wrote:
> 
> On Thursday 08 February 2007 11:02, Andrew Perrin wrote:
> > On Thu, 8 Feb 2007, Steve Litt wrote:
> > > Absolutely! LaTeX creates a beautifully typeset book. My last 3 books
> > > (and my upcoming one) were written in LaTeX (in my case via the LyX front
> > > end).
> >
> > Sadly, my publisher was not so up-to-date. I wrote my book in LaTeX and
> > had to use oolatex to morph it into Word format for the copy editing.
> 
> Is there an emoticon for "barf"?
> 
> Couldn't one define a "query" and "queryanswer" style, which would show up in 
> the LaTeX source but not on the finished document, that could be used for 
> queries and answers?
> 
> The one advantage I see to MSWord is it has revisions, so you can see what's 
> changed. I don't remember that too much -- it was mostly queries and answers, 
> as I remember.
> 
> 
> > Then 
> > -- insult of insults -- the typesetters converted it back into LaTeX for
> > the typesetting!
> 
> I wonder how they converted MSWord into LaTeX. Probably had a set of LaTeX 
> environments and commands exactly mimicking the styles you had in MSWord.
> 
> By the way, what book did you write?
> 
> SteveT
> 
> Steve Litt
> Author: Universal Troubleshooting Process books and courseware
> http://www.troubleshooters.com/
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