Re: docx roundtrip

[Daniel Vainsencher]

I would suggest some connections between seemingly different projects here: 1. For round tripping, there is a close link between the exporter and importer, because the importer must understand, in addition to the external format, the side information provided by the exporter (say, math-macro defs). 2. The structure of a round-trip exporter-importer may be similar between different external formats. So it might be useful to describe this project as "round-trip collaboration", giving latex and some other format (say, docx) as the first two goals instances, but designing it with a hope for generality. It is sometimes said that design for a general case should occur after solving three particular instances, but I hope someone with more technical LyX background will chime in. Daniel On 04/18/2013 12:52 PM, Rainer M. Krug wrote: stefano franchi <stefano.fran...@gmail.com> writes: On Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 9:50 AM, Rainer M. Krug <rai...@krugs.de> wrote: Liviu Andronic <landronim...@gmail.com> writes: Dear Daniel, On Sun, Apr 14, 2013 at 10:26 AM, Daniel Vainsencher <daniel.vainsenc...@gmail.com> wrote: Please CC me on answers. I often collaborate with people who (still) prefer LaTeX, and also submit papers to conferences that make it easy to submit latex via style/class/sample.tex files. This makes it important to be able to work in LyX, but debug/modify in latex, then continue working in LyX. I would strongly agree with this. Round-tripping LyX <--> LaTeX documents is one of the long-term goals of LyX. And in my understanding this is something that lies in the realm of achievable. What we need is, mostly, for a devel or student to show more love to the tex2lyx conversion routines. It would probably be difficult to preserve latex source formatting etc, and I am not proposing that; I am assuming the main source of content is LyX. Two particular features would make this easier: - Math-macros, if turned into \global\long\def, should be turned back so LyX's beautiful visual editing is restored (can keep the math-macro def in a comment in the latex version and restore it). BTW, when does a math-macro become a \newcommand vs \global\long\def? - Automatically generate styles for environments defined in imported documents. For example if the imported latex has a keywords environment, that should not suddenly become ERT in LyX. This should allow me to start from the conference sample file, import it into LyX, and obtain a first class lyx environment. Both your suggestions look useful, although I'm wondering how achievable is the 2nd one. I'd love to hear what established devels think of this. Either way, I think this is a project worthy for GSoC and if you can come up with a suitably worded project proposal feel free to place it here: http://wiki.lyx.org/Devel/SummerOfCode2013Ideas (and let us know on lyx-devel). This would greatly increase the chances of a student picking it up. And if we have no student for such a project this year, we should certainly consider it for subsequent GSoC summers. While we are talking about roundtrip - there is still the dreaded issue of MS Word (docx) roundtrip. There is again and again the discussion coming up of exporting to docx and importing docx, and (especially in the humanities as I gather from these discussions) many journals only accept doc / docx for submission. Absolutely! A minimum level of compatibility with MS Word (or openOffice) would be a great boon to LyX. Actually, I think roundtripping, while Sorry - haven't mentioned openOffice / LibreOffice. But I encountered quite a few problrms with their odt - docx - odt conversions, that I think an .lyx -> .odt converter is a different story. desirable is probably out of reach for even moderately complex documents. I don't know enough about the docx format, but as you say below, if one 1) defines a set of desired features for the roundtrip 2) agrees on a way on how to deal with the other features (putting them in comment sections or accompanying second file, so that they can be re-applied on the re-import?) 3) uses these guidelines to develop the round-trip converter lyx -> docx and docx -> lyx it should be doable and possible to grow the converters over time y adding new features supported. Even a warning of non-supported formating features would relatively easy to accomplish (do the round-trip and see). What is really needed is a decent LyX --> doc export filter, and precisely for the reasons Rainer mentioned: most publishers in the humanities accept .doc only. Ideally, an export filter to doc should preserve semantically relevant formatting (emphasis, footnotes, refs, cross-ref, and little else) and discard everything else. I can not agree more - but that could be separate from the round-trip converters. A non-round-trip converter could be present to convert as many features as possible *without* round-trip support. Rainer Stefano Not only the journals, but the use of LateX and LyX is not that widespread (as it should be!) in academia in general (some natural science disciplines excluded). So to make co-operation with MS Word users possible, an improved export to docx and round trip would be very useful. Also, I would assume that this feature would make LyX much more widely used. Cheers, Rainer Regards , Liviu -- Rainer M. Krug, PhD (Conservation Ecology, SUN), MSc (Conservation Biology, UCT), Dipl. Phys. (Germany) Centre of Excellence for Invasion Biology Stellenbosch University South Africa Tel : +33 - (0)9 53 10 27 44 Cell: +33 - (0)6 85 62 59 98 Fax : +33 - (0)9 58 10 27 44 Fax (D): +49 - (0)3 21 21 25 22 44 email: rai...@krugs.de Skype: RMkrug