Justin and Scott,
There are ways to change a LaTeX document into a Word format document.
They're just rather painful, because they usually aren't fully
automatic. I found two relevant pages for APA style:
• "Writing a research methods paper in APA style using LaTeX" at:
http://www.personality-project.org/revelle/syllabi/205/apa.style.html
This page is actually quite useful, especially if you read "The LaTeX
example document" section and the succeeding sections. The linked
entries show the starting LaTeX document (with lots of comment lines
-- all the lines that start with "%") and the output PDF manuscript.
The next section shows how you can change the argument of the style
file and get output formatted manuscript (double-spaced) or journal
(single-spaced, 2-column) output.
(The only comment I have is that you had to read through too many
pages and links to get to the actual style file links)
• "Tools for Converting APA-format LaTeX files to MSWord" from the
web page "Misc OpenSource Software from Randall O'Reilly" at:
http://psych.colorado.edu/~oreilly/misc_software.html#ltxapa2rtf
This person customized the APA style files to extend support to more
complex citation formats. He's actually talking about a preprocessor
he wrote called ltxapa2rtf and then using a standard LaTeX to RTF
converter called latex2rtf (link to SourceForge given at the web
page). The problem is that you usually have to clean up lots of
things by hand. However, you might want to read this page to check out
his templates for Open Office.
I do recommend that Scott take a look at the first link, because that
seems to be a full description about how to use LaTeX for APA style
papers. I'd skip over the detailed links about APA style at the start
of the page, because that's material that Scott already has from his
course. The later sections deal with the mechanics of using LaTeX
with APA style and give examples of bibliographies.
HTH
Cheers,
Esther
On Dec 26, 2008, at 9:34 AM, Justin Harford wrote:
I'm sorry to say there is no way to change a LaTeX document with
editing elements so extensive as a bibliography and headers, to a MS
word format. This might be where the PDF bibliography combined with
MS word report would be a good idea if you could get your teacher to
accept the PDF. Hmm, maybe you could use Nisus, I think with some
fiddling you could make it do the needed headers. Doublespacing is
easy with it, and footnotes at least are doable. And it doesn't
have smart text so doing the spaces the second line of each bib
entry could maybe be managable. Otherwise I wonder if you couldn't
use multiple word processors. Like maybe OO does headers better,
and Nisus does bib better?
Sure would be nice if they'd accept PDF, I never thought I'd find
electronic homework turn-in so repulsive.
Regards
Justin Harford
On Dec 26, 2008, at 3:30 AM, Scott Howell wrote:
Justin, I do have an interest in Latex if there's a way to turn out
the documents in more than pdf. If I can get instructors to accept
the pdf files then I'm good, but if not, I'll have to find some
other format. If they could even be exported/saved etc. as rtf
files, that would be a good deal. I have not had the opportunity to
dig very far into this, but if you can tell me what I need to get
started and if I can do a bit of rtfm to get up and running, this
might be a solution. I know I saddly haven't enough hours to really
learn all there is to know, but I have done a little html coding in
the past, so inserting characters into my document as I type won't
be a problem for me. Hell if I could type in commands to center
text and all that stuff, at least I'd know I was getting what I
wanted instead of assuming the word processor actually did it.
I'm going to go out and try to dig up the package you mentioned and
if there is a particular document I should read that would help me
get up and going as quickly as possible., please let me know.
tnx
On Dec 25, 2008, at 11:03 PM, Justin Harford wrote:
Me too. Not that I would be planning on changing over to wigiwise
word formatting, but I am always interested to know what's crackin
in the mac VO world for normal people who don't feel like spending
hours of their time glooed to a computer getting headaches over
buggy LaTeX documents etc. Not that that's how it is anymore for
me, but the learning curve was a bit steep.
Now I did write some papers on the mac using textedit a few years
back when I first got it. They turned out fine. I was able to do
doublespacing and that was about as complex as I needed to make
it. I actually had to open the docs in MS word under win to
format with headers.
The impression I have got lately with the short looks I have taken
at wigiwise word processors under OS X such as OO, and Nisus, has
been that it is fine if all you need to do is some bold and
italicized text, double or 1.5 line spacing, a footnote or endnote
here and there, and a big bold title, but for people with more
serious word processing needs such as headers and footers, and
these weird requirements for bibliographies imposed by the APA
society, among others, the word processing world under mac just
doesn't cut it. Note that I am only refering to the wigiwise
processors. As well this does not imply that I have ever
successfully done any of this stuff under windows. My personal
experience has been that before I changed over to the mac, I never
really took word processing seriously, and since my switch, the
quality of my written documents has improved, thanks to the LaTeX
document preparation system with voiceover. Mac OS X with
voiceover offers a LaTeX experience like no other I have worked
with. it is easy to install, it is pleasant to type and read
with, it is relyable, and it just works. I have tried to use
LaTeX solutions under win and found it difficult to read the error
log which is very important for typesetting, and that typing latex
with JAWS just wasn't as enjoyable. I also tried it under linux
and found that nice, but I definitely prefer my mac.
So again, I could be one of those people who contends that
wordprocessing under the mac is better than win based on my own
experiences, but that would not be taking into consideration the
fact that I had to learn to typeset with LaTeX to get any
compelling output from my machine. I would like to note also that
I have tried in the past to query this list for tips on working
with wigiwise to get no answer. All that said, if someone would
like to write us on this and tell us what they have accomplished
with OO or Nisus in terms of word processing, I would be quite
happy. As well if anyone ever decides to take the LaTeX root, I
am always here if you have a buggy document that is giving you
problems, or if you just have a typesetting question. I am used
to these sorts of emails as I teach a class on this very subject
at UC Berkeley. As well I'm sure that Esther would be willing to
do the same.
Regards
Justin Harford
On Dec 25, 2008, at 6:17 PM, David Poehlman wrote:
I'm hoping that someone will post on this but they may actually
hang out on the macvoiceover list.
On Dec 24, 2008, at 6:49 PM, Justin Harford wrote:
Hi David
folk are having pretty good luck with oo.
What have people managed to work out with its word processor?
Scott Howell
[email protected]
