stefano franchi <stefano.fran...@gmail.com> writes:

> On Mon, Jun 10, 2013 at 1:44 PM, Les Denham <lden...@hal-pc.org> wrote:
>
>> On Sun, 9 Jun 2013 10:32:20 -0500
>> stefano franchi <stefano.fran...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> > I'm willing to bet you won't find such an example. The reason is
>> > simple: more or less by definition a best-seller is book produced by
>> > a major commercial publishing house supported by a consistent
>> > marketing effort, heavily edited by a professional editor and laid
>> > out by a (team of ) typesetters according to a carefully designed
>> > house-specific graphic design project.
>>
>> While that is the traditional definition of a best seller, it is
>> becoming less and less relevant.
>>
>
> You may be right. As I said, I'm a pessimist. Yet, I've still to meet the
> production editor of a major publishing house who would accept a manuscript
> in LyX or Latex formats. Whereas I've met editors willing to accept a
> *paper* manuscript and have it retyped in Word.
>
>
>> I use LyX rather than Word (or its clones) because it allows me to
>> produce a presentable document in about half the time it takes with
>> Word. This is emphatically the case if it is a document requiring a
>> detailed table of contents, an index, or a bibliography, or if it
>> contains figures, cross-references or footnotes.
>>
>>
> I guess that's the very reason why we all use LyX. I certainly wouldn't be
> as productive in Word. But those of us working in the Humanities (at least
> some Humanities) then have to budget some time to convert the output to
> Word. Nothing else is accepted. I tend to think best-sellers authors'
> position is closer to us than to a physicist's, a mathematician's or a
> logician's. That's why a minimal and yet reliable LyX-to-Doc converter---a
> topic we've repeatedly discussed on the list---would make such a difference
> to the non-technical user, IMHO.
>

This developed into a very interesting and I guess useful discussion -
thanks.
And, as you said, it brings back the question of export to docx.

I think I mentioned it already, but I made quite good experiences with
using pandoc[1]:

,----
| #
| # FORMATS SECTION ##########################
| #
| \format "msdocx" "docx" "Microsoft docx" "" 
"/usr/share/playonlinux/playonlinux --run \"Microsoft Word 2010\"" 
"/usr/share/playonlinux/playonlinux --run \"Microsoft Word 2010\"" 
"document,menu=export"
| #
| # CONVERTERS SECTION ##########################
| #
| \converter "xhtml" "msdocx" "pandoc -o $$o $$i" ""
`----

it is most definitely not perfect, but for reltively simple documents,
it works nicely. I used it to convert a handbook with pictures and
references, but I don't think footnotes, for my co-authors to review and
for sending to layouting.

There are definitely aspects which would need improvement here, but this
was the beast way I could find. 

To improve the export, one could go two ways: improve an existing tool
(e.g. pandoc) to be used as the universal converter, to possibly even
include .lyx as an input format, to produce satisfying non-tex and
non-(x)html outputs, or to write an own tool. 

The question is, how interested people are and how one could get this
(internal ox external to LyX) converter.

I would guess, as not much has materialized after the previous
discussions, that the problem is, that the ones interested in this
feature, do have no time or not enough expertise (myself) to do it. So
how could one still make any progress in this feature? 

I like the idea from Steve, as seeing LyX as a frontend for different
backends for export, where the LaTeX backend is the authoritative one.

And in my personal opinion, it would be a very useful to investigate
pandoc further, as it already has a variety of output formats.
,----
| - HTML formats :: XHTML, HTML5, and HTML slide shows using Slidy, Slideous, 
S5, or DZSlides.
| - Word processor formats :: Microsoft Word docx, OpenOffice/LibreOffice ODT, 
OpenDocument XML
| - Ebooks :: EPUB version 2 or 3, FictionBook2
| - Documentation formats :: DocBook, GNU TexInfo, Groff man pages
| - TeX formats :: LaTeX, ConTeXt, LaTeX Beamer slides
| - PDF :: via LaTeX
| - Lightweight markup formats :: Markdown, reStructuredText, AsciiDoc, 
MediaWiki markup, Emacs Org-Mode, Textile
`----

These are just ideas from my side, but to try to incorporate pandoc
into LyX in the same way as LaTeX is Incorporated, would make LyX even
more powerful then it is already now.

Cheers,

Rainer

>
>
> Cheers,
>
> S.



Footnotes: 
[1]  http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/

-- 
Rainer M. Krug

email: RMKrug<at>gmail<dot>com

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