Hi Rob, first: great project! I constantly struggle with converting file to and from MS Word. I now use the Word-->OOffice--> Latex--> Lyx Route, with the needed manual cleanup of Latex code and an additional cleanup of ERT code from LyX after LaTeX import. It is not fun. A project like yours would make LyX much, much easier to use in an academic environment.
I am going to address your questions from the perspective of a Humanities scholar. My observations may not be representative of the vast majority of current LyX/LaTeX users. On the other hand, a project like yours may potentially expand LyX's user base by an order of magnitude, in my opinion. So here we go: > Is this a tool that would prove useful to yourselves, your collaborators, > and others? > What features would you consider essential? > > (Right now, styles based conversion looks pretty easy -- going from Heading > 1 in Word to Chapter, for example. But I'm not sure how well it would > convert maths. This is something I'll still need to look at, and may require > writing an additional module.) > As I said, it would be very important. In my experience, there are three main scenarios where the tool would be precious: 1. Conversion of personal legacy documents (all the stuff you wrote before you discovered LyX) 2. Collaboration with colleagues and students 3. Submission to journals (I don't know of a single journal in my field and related fields that accepts Latex. They all want MS Word.) 1 and 3 are obviously one way (in opposite direction). 2 requires a Word<-->LyX roundtrip I think the most important scenarios are 2 and 3. And obviously 2 includes 3 and 1, so solving the collaboration scenario would be optimal. Features: I think a good starting assumption is that final formatting will NOT be provided by MS Word. If you (or your team) has to produce camera-ready output at the end of the collaborative work, LyX is a much better tool. If you submit to a journal or a press, they will do the formatting.This means most Word-based typography can be eliminated. I mean: margins, typefaces, font sizes, etc, with the exception of different scripts, which are of course crucial (although with Unicode this problem should be solved now). Only semantic formatting should be kept: emphasis/italics, sectioning info, lists, footnotes, etc. Plus all info about pictures and picture placement, tables (these are not trivial, I guess) and similar floats, and, mostly for books, indexing information. Preserving tracking info wold also be very useful. Cross-referencing would also be important (I have no idea how Word does it, if at all). Math, on the other hand, would not be very important. That is: I assume math would be finally produced by Latex, if camera-ready is required, or by the publishing house. A rough approximation would be sufficient (this from a Humanities perspective, of course). References would be very very important. > What is the best tool to look at for guidance in creating a new script for > word2lyx? tex2lyx? I would look at Word2Tex, which is proprietary, however. In general, though, most existing tools try hard to preserve the look of a document instead of following the approach I recommend, thereby getting into all sort of complications. There was a very useful tool for Framemaker <--> LyX conversion that stuck to the semantic-only approach and worked pretty well (I was a Framemaker user before moving to LyX). It was very simple and I believe it is still available: http://pages.cs.brandeis.edu/~pablo/mif2lyx. It is a Perl script. > Does the script need to support special cases, such as importing Word "track > changes"? See above > Just how important do you consider "round-tripping" a document, e.g., going > from LyX to Word and back to LyX. Yes! > Is there anyone who might be interested in collaborating on this? > I am afraid I cannot help with coding. But I am willing to help in other ways if needed. Cheers, Stefano -- __________________________________________________ Stefano Franchi Associate Research Professor Department of Hispanic Studies Ph: +1 (979) 845-2125 Texas A&M University Fax: +1 (979) 845-6421 College Station, Texas, USA stef...@tamu.edu http://stefano.cleinias.org
