I was not going into WORD but into LibreOffice Writer.
I realize the difficulties in such conversions, but I do have
colleague who will not use anything but MS-WORD, and I do
collaborate with them on some manuscripts.
It is much less of a problem for a short paper.
EK
On 05/01/2013 11:32 PM, David L.
Johnson wrote:
On
05/01/2013 10:59 PM, Jerry wrote:
On May 1, 2013, at 5:21 AM, ehud.kaplan
wrote:
I had tried to convert from a Lyx
document (a Ph.D. thesis, ~140 pages) to LibreOffice
(File/Export/HTML). Much of it worked, but there were many
problems:
• Equation numbers moved from right to left
• Figures were totally distorted (size scaled up),
• Some equations and algorithms were mangled
• Several sections appeared centered instead of being left
justified as they were originally.
Using File/Export/LYXHTML produced similar results, although
the equation numbers were not mangled.
In short, such conversions do a lot, but they also leave a lot
for manual fixing. I suspect that if such a path were
available, many more people would use Lyx.
I agree, as do many others.
A while back I spent a lot of time evaluating the various ways
to convert LyX to .odt or .docx and found that none of them work
well. (Apologies to those who are reading this who have actually
worked on the problem and made substantial progress.) Some work
with certain restricted sets of features but add an equation or
something else and they break.
One would hope with all the talk on the developers' list
recently with the Google Summer of Code that this would be at
the top of the list of things to do.
I am somewhat confused about this. I see the need to convert a
TeX document, or by extension a LyX file, to (or from) Word format
to be an occasional thing, necessitated by some journal insisting
on Word, or a collaborator who can't work with anything else. I
don't see this as something worth the large amount of effort to
make into a single button-push. For one thing, that would
probably be unfeasible even in the short term, and since the
latest Word formats are a moving target it would require
significant maintenance even if it were possible.
I coauthored a paper that my collaborator typed, in Word. Not
only could I not translate that to something I could read ---
Ooffice at the time could not read the equations he had done in
Word, but the journal actually re-typeset the whole thing in LaTeX
in order to print it.
I would not expect to be able to effortlessly convert a 140-page
thesis from Word *.docx to html. Can Word itself really do that
in a way that does not mangle equations?
--
Ehud Kaplan, Ph.D.
Jules and Doris Stein Research to Prevent Blindness
Professor
Director, The laboratory of Visual & Computational
Neuroscience
Director, Center for Excellence in Computational &
Systems Neuroscience
Friedman Brain Institute
Departments of Neuroscience, Ophthalmology, Structural &
Chemical Biology,
The Ichan school of medicine at Mount Sinai
One Gustave Levy Place,
NY, NY, 10029
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