Hi Edward, After giving it further thought having Leo update a live .odt file is functionally useless. All of the other niceties of a WYSIWYG word processor can be dealt with in Leo with sufficient time, understanding and a little scripting. ie. Header, footer, footnotes, references, citations, line spacing, margins etc.
There is a large class of users of word processors on various platforms whose idea of an outline is very traditional and doesn't extend to software. Word's outliner is kinda cludgy, but it works for hundreds of millions of people. OO and LibreOffice are reduced to using styles as outlines. Leo is the only outliner for Linux that supports cloning. This one feature alone leads to too many benefits for serious writers to ignore, which is why so many serious writers have either given up on Linux or "invented" numerous workarounds in their work flow. If cloning in an outliner is important to a writer, Mac has OmniOutliner and others, Windows has a number of choices but Linux has one choice only, Leo. And the learning curve for Leo for a writer is in most cases simply too steep. I can only speak for myself, but having an outliner with the power of Leo embedded into OO or LibreOffice would be a no brainer for me. I am happy enough with the toolchain you posit, simply because I have spent an inordinate amount of time over the past couple of years exploring the alternatives. I do not have the financial resources to exist in the Mac or the Windows world. So I have been slowly working Leo into my work. It has been like having a state of the art computer at my fingertips with no software and no operating system and only needing it to tell me what time it is. So much of the functionality is wasted on me and in the mean time I have had to take the time to learn to program in assembly to get the time to print to a piece of paper because I can't figure out how to write a video driver. :-) If a user could install OO and a Leo plugin or Leo with hooks and could access the outlining functionality from within their word processor, they would. In droves. It may turn out though, that what I am really talking about is a fork of Leo with a severely stripped down feature set packed into a plugin for OO that would do the job for the majority of users. A bowie knife instead of a swiss army knife approach. And at that point there would probably be little or no interest from your POV as it would be useless for a programmer. I am comfortable with the workflow I have as it currently stands. Millions of other writers who could benefit from Leo will never go through the process I have to get here. I have the power of cloning to help organize my work and can easily output the three main filetypes I need as finished products which are .docx, .pdf and .html and have all three formats look the same. I started in the world of Latex, but found no good way to go from Kile to .docx. Any work done in a word processor is tied to the filetype and conversion to .pdf or .html for example includes too many compromises in the output files. I have only been seriously using and exploring Leo as my primary content creation platform for about a month now. I attempted it a couple of years ago but got mired in spending too much time figuring out all of the niceties. To back away from the entire idea of word processor integration for a moment and back to how Leo can become the go to program for more users, to become more "popular". If there was a Leo configuration that presented a writer with the tools needed and buried the rest of the complexity until wanted or needed it would put Leo into a different marketplace. You recently realized the utility of being able to mark up text with keystrokes and the plugin that Terry created for me does that. This may seem somewhat useful to you, for a writer it is critically important. I spent years on the muscle memory of Ctrl-B, Ctrl-I for bold and italic simply because that is the universal standard in the world of rich text (not rtf) word processing programs. If Leo could present a true WYSIWYG writing environment that supports the standard text editing short-cuts, it would gain instant popularity potential with millions of writers. Trying to bolt it onto a word processor is probably not the right approach. As a non-programmer I am hesitant to ask you or your team to consider this simply because it would be so useless for your needs as programmers. But this is about making Leo more popular, so I will ask. How hard would it be to set-up a working environment for the writers of all of the content in the world that aren't programs or a web pages? - WYSIWYG editor pane: Keep the rst and the conversions available under the hood. This is a powerful level of flexibility that no other word processor for Linux currently offers. But like it or not, WYSIWYG is where it is at for the majority of writers in the world, not because it is better in any way, but that it is comfortable. - A set of plugins and a myLeoSettings.leo file that set-up a default environment for writers, rather than programmers. I have seen a few others on this forum who have proposed a more traditional settings widget to manage this. Again, muscle memory. I still find myself going naturally to the menu bar to find the Preferences. - A clear and concise tutorial on workflow for writers. These three things would probably do it. 90% of Leo's functionality, its features and benefits, are simply wasted on someone who isn't programming. But there is a subset that would be invaluable to many more people who write and there are many more of them than there are programmers. You have created a writers dream tool. It is simply a matter of putting a pretty face on it and customizing some of the functions to make it marketable. Chris On Wed, Oct 30, 2013 at 5:05 AM, Edward K. Ream <[email protected]> wrote: > On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 10:07 PM, Terry Brown <[email protected]>wrote: > >> On Mon, 28 Oct 2013 15:08:02 -0700 >> Chris George <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> > Leo --> rst --> output using docutils using rst3 command --> pandoc to >> > convert to html that LibreOffice can open correctly --> save as .odt >> >> rst2odt --strip-comments --smart-quotes=yes prog201310.rst >> >prog201310.odt >> libreoffice --headless --convert-to docx prog201310.odt >> >> .docx files from Leo. :-) >> > > I played around with this, and was able to create a OpenOffice file, and > so, presumably, a Word file. Like this:: > > commands = [ > 'rst2odt --strip-comments --smart-quotes=yes rst2odt-test.html.txt > rst2odt.odt', > '&oo rst2odt.odt', # oo.bat opens OpenOffice > ] > g.execute_shell_commands(commands,trace=True) > > I'm unclear about what the point of all this is. The .leo file "rendered" > in OpenOffice doesn't seem particularly useful. Care to enlighten me? > > Edward > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "leo-editor" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/leo-editor. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "leo-editor" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/leo-editor. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
