On Sunday 05 April 2009 11:06:38 am Rich Shepard wrote: > On Sun, 5 Apr 2009, Wolfgang Keller wrote: > > In fact in collaborative environments (e.g. companies), where several > > people work together on the same document, Word documents _always_ end up > > like that - A hopelessly tangled spaghetti mess. In fact I never managed > > to figure out how to copy and paste content from two different versions > > of a document, which are both perfectly well "styled" and which were > > created using the same "template" in such a way that the resulting > > document isn't messed up. > > I'm surprised that no one seems to use the most reasonable solution for > collaborative text: have everyone use plain text and only futz with > formatting when you agree on a final version. It may not look pretty, but > it's efficient. > > Rich
This is what I did with my latest (upcoming) book. I authored it in VimOutliner (http://www.vimoutliner.org). Because it was authored as an outline, styles part, chapter, section, subsection, subsubsection, paragraph and subparagraph were already spoken for. With environments like Story, Tip, Note, Warning, and Caution, I used <story> and </story>. For emphasis I used capital letters. As many of you know, VimOutliner has body text so I could write the entire book in VimOutliner. Once I imported the outline into LyX, I made a layout file and made skeliton environments Tip, Story, Note, etc. Then within LyX I searched <story>, <tip> etc, marked them with the proper environments, and eliminated the markup. The whole deal took about a day. Here's the thing though. To mark content with appropriate styles when authoring plain text. you need to go to A LOT of extra work. It would be much easier in LaTeX or LyX. SteveT Steve Litt Recession Relief Package http://www.recession-relief.US
