"Christopher M." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> The problem with a direct conversion, I'm gussing, is something like the
> following (non-technical). LaTeX is a markup language. That means that even
> when you get past LyX to LaTeX, your still doing the wysiwym thing, in a way.
> But Word is wysiwyg.
>
> Now, though I don't know how wysiwyg formatting code work, I'm guessing
> that the control codes specify things like position on a page, etc., in an
> absolute, rather than relative way-- which never ever corresponds to anything
> LaTeX ever knows, even when it gets to dvi. The two simply are apples and
> oranges.
>
> Star/Open office is able to do the conversion to Word, and likewise KWord,
> because they too are wysiwyg, and therefore their control codes are 'of a kind'
> with Word's, and so its only a (albeit complicated) mapping of equivalences
> between them.
I tend to think this style of wordprocessor supports both kinds of
authoring (WYM and WYG). Most nontechnical users that use Word or
StarOffice for a report go and manually change the font size for each
different section. What they do provide is a Style concept that one
could use to do a translation. The formatting information that tex
applies would be lost but there could be psuedo maps from textclass ->
style and let the author go figure out how the heck word puts its
styles together today.
Using these styles in StarOffice and being constantly frustrated by
the things it did for me automatically with regards to positioning
text on screen is what made me frustrated enough to use LyX once I
decided avoiding formal writing wasn't an appropriate solution and I
gave up on just using psgml in emacs b/c my eyes can't see past the
tags. The need to tweak led me else where..
Side Note: I just fired up word 2000 on a machine here and spent
about 10 minutes looking for this style menu hidden down a >> tab. It
has conveniently been hidden like every other useful feature word had
that made it acceptable to use many moons ago.
>
> Is this explanation roughly on target, guys?
For the majority of cases but if one were well versed in a word
format, lyx -> word shouldn't be too horrible as long as great results
aren't expected. For the majority of documents coming the other way,
it might as well be doc -> txt -> lyx
--
Chris Green <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Laugh and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone.
