Hi,
First of all my apologies to Beni and to Tzafrir for the delay in
answering and thankin them for the suggestions: I was busy
evaluating two alternative routes from my coleagues at work.
One was that the LaTex route might be used, followed by dvipdfm
and cut & paste from pdf to ms word: It does not work cleanly, but
that might be good enough for the drafts to my boss (thanks Oleg
for the implied suggestion).
The second was help with ms word's macros, to enable me to go the
route I considered in the first place. This seems to work allright.
I turns out that with little extra work, one can go both routes:
I took my initial text file, created empty lines to delimit
paragraphs, as required by Tex, issued a :g/^/s// / (this
is a tab space), and then introduced on lines of their own,
flush to the left margin the Latex commands applying to the
whole document or to groups of lines (\usepackage, \section,
\begin{enumerate}...etc).
Except for the {} around the titles, this is close enough to the
initial draft to allow me to write, while only thinking at the
contents.
Should I need for a moment a cleaner display, all I need to do is
:! cut -s -f2 THIS FILE | less.
The output of this command, passed through a filter (sed) that
removes the round brackets also serves as input for ms word.
On the other hand, the uncastrated file, passed through a filter
(again sed) that performs all the substitutions required by latex
(cm${-1}$ instead cm-1, AlPO$_4$ insted AlPO4, \item instead -> in
the enumeration lists..etc) is the input for laTex.
Now, after aknoledging that the macros of word are not all that
bad, I have to do justice to abiword: Instead of macros it uses
python scripts. I guess that puts a lot of power at the
fingertips of people familiar with this interpreter.
The bottom line: I won't be learning html this time. I have a
solution for my immediate peoblem and a lot to do to reach an
acceptable level of proficiency in laTex (which is fun).
In the future...Unless I'll have a compelling reason to learn
python, I think I'll prefer the laTex route, as suggested by Tzafrir.
Cheers and thanks everyone, Avraham
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