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Pandoc

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Re: Pandoc

#281

Post by w0m »

themadturk wrote: post #224
2cynykyl wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also use Word for all my writing too, so wanted to defend you. People (tech people at least) have lost sight of the fact that writing should happen in "word processing software", and Word is the best-in-class. To people who say "Word sux", I say "That just means you don't know how to use Word properly". Writing any markup or markdown syntax in an IDE is a disaster for the creative process. Jack Kerouac used to type…

If you're going to bring up Kerouac with his rolls of paper, you're better off talking about WordStar than Word. Word divides the document into discrete pages, while WordStar documents were long uninterrupted ribbons of text, just like Kerouac's rolls. Perhaps Kerouac "got it," but so do George R.R. Martin and Robert Sawyer, writers who continue to use WordStar decades after its demise (Sawyer even talks about the be…

I was under the assumption docx was simply an XML wrapper in a well known format. MS can't come in and break it without creating a new extension, invalidating deprecation concerns. That said - I do everything in markdown regardless so I can use a code editor more comfortably.

Re: Pandoc

#282

Post by gertlex »

yashrk wrote: post #264
gertlex wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but when you start saying what other people 'should' be doing then they're going to speak up. That's not a prerequisite for the Latex folks, in my experience :D (I'm also in the "wrote my masters thesis in word, including the fair number of equations" group)

Of course you can choose what you use for your personal pipeline. But Word for collaborative work is a nightmare. Sometimes fastest way to work with the science text or documentation in a Word document is to hire a freelancer to retype all the text in LaTeX or something else. It's a kind of Trolley problem: sometimes Word fanboys, unfortunately, _should_ suffer to let all the team get the job done.

See? I didn't even tell anyone what they should do, and here's a Latex guy spouting off :)

Re: Pandoc

#283

Post by ghost-towels »

2cynykyl wrote: post #126
_Algernon_ wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most tech people who use Word know how to use it and that is exactly the problem. We don't have the benefit of ignorance. We send off drafts to someone for commenting or editing and get an inconsistently formatted mess back because others don't even know that styles exist and use manual / direct formatting instead. We are the ones that have to suffer because people we are forced to collaborate with do not take 5 minu…

Good point, sigh...this is so true. I have created a 45 minute tutorial of 'how to use word properly' to address this exact pain point. I send a link to my students if their first draft commits any 'sins'. BTW, when I said tech people, I was thinking mostly about the computer savvy academics who use Latex for everything.

Would you mind sharing that link? I completely understand if you’d rather not for privacy reasons though! If not could you recommend a different tutorial?

I come from a trades background and am now in the academic field (teaching and admin for my trade) and I would really like to do some professional development in this area. Also excel! I know I’m lacking and it would help my long suffering director haha.

Re: Pandoc

#284

Post by graemep »

2cynykyl wrote: post #57
andy99 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll probably lose some nerd cred: I do most of my writing in MS word, I find it easier to cut and paste and add footnotes and section headers. And then I use Pandoc to convert the docx into the format I want, usually HTML*. I used to do markdown in vim but I found that for most of what I do I prefer word. I do write code in vim... * I use this css file when converting: https://gist.github.com/killercup/5917178

I also use Word for all my writing too, so wanted to defend you. People (tech people at least) have lost sight of the fact that writing should happen in "word processing software", and Word is the best-in-class. To people who say "Word sux", I say "That just means you don't know how to use Word properly". Writing any markup or markdown syntax in an IDE is a disaster for the creative process. Jack Kerouac used to type…

> Writing any markup or markdown syntax in an IDE is a disaster for the creative process

MS Word or markup in an IDE are not the only options.

I used to use Lyx quite a lot. The best of both worlds in many ways.

There are text editors which give you a simple UI than an IDE without the distractions and complexity of a word processor. I find Kate quite pleasant to write in.

There are distraction free writers editors (which will often save in wordprocessor formats) that exist only because a lot of people find wordprocessors are a "disaster for the creative process".

Re: Pandoc

#285

Post by graemep »

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #104
Diti wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any reason for why you’re not considering AsciiDoc?

Seconding this. Asciidoc was created to be a simple mapping to DocBook - which was specifically designed for writing books. It should be able to handle everything you need, but if there is some esoteric requirement, you can write your own processor. Then again, content is king. Write it on napkins if you must. When complete, you can spend two days to transcribe to whatever format the publisher requires.

That sounds like what I need. I have been using Latex (which I find distracting) and restructured text (which I am less familiar with at the moment) with Sphinx. How does Asciidoc compare to restructured text? Both were intended for writing documentation so are similar in capabilities?

Re: Pandoc

#286

Post by kcartlidge »

w0m wrote: post #281
themadturk wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're going to bring up Kerouac with his rolls of paper, you're better off talking about WordStar than Word. Word divides the document into discrete pages, while WordStar documents were long uninterrupted ribbons of text, just like Kerouac's rolls. Perhaps Kerouac "got it," but so do George R.R. Martin and Robert Sawyer, writers who continue to use WordStar decades after its demise (Sawyer even talks about the be…

I was under the assumption docx was simply an XML wrapper in a well known format. MS can't come in and break it without creating a new extension, invalidating deprecation concerns. That said - I do everything in markdown regardless so I can use a code editor more comfortably.

> I was under the assumption docx was simply an XML wrapper in a well known format. MS can't come in and break it without creating a new extension, invalidating deprecation concerns.

Sort of.

It's a ZIP containing a collection of XML files. The actual content is a single file, but you need separate ancillary XML files for things like styles, links, headers/footers, numbering schemes and so on. Each with complicated namespacing and nesting rules and each file referencing items in the others.

The area where it is most at risk (for me personally in practice) is the lax handling of the file by Word itself. As a specific example there are nested XML elements where sibling child elements define properties on the main element, such as properties that define paragraph styles.

Being siblings they should be supported in any order, but in practice generating DOCX files and importing them into Word will fail for no obvious reason, until you reorder them in the raw XML (even though they are still at the same level in the hierarchy). Then they work.

In other words, it's less the 'spec' and more the MS implementation that makes it fragile. And different versions of Word can have different behaviour in that regard.

Re: Pandoc

#288

Post by lightspot21 »

BrandoElFollito wrote: post #276
yashrk wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course you can choose what you use for your personal pipeline. But Word for collaborative work is a nightmare. Sometimes fastest way to work with the science text or documentation in a Word document is to hire a freelancer to retype all the text in LaTeX or something else. It's a kind of Trolley problem: sometimes Word fanboys, unfortunately, _should_ suffer to let all the team get the job done.

> But Word for collaborative work is a nightmare Why? It has comments, tracking etc. Concurrent edition i impossible, though (even when MS says it is possible). For that Google Docs is great (or some self-hosted systems)

> Why? It has comments, tracking etc. Concurrent edition i impossible, though (even when MS says it is possible). For that Google Docs is great (or some self-hosted systems)

It doesn't scale. At all.

I used to work at a university lab group where all 30 of us would need to concurrently write, edit and review 150+-page, heavily technical reports with lots of diagrams and tables spanning pages. To be clear, most of the time all of us were working on the exact same huge document.

Word's version tracking stood no chance. Formatting was regularly off, tables were breaking apart, diagrams misplaced. Syncing was extremely bad, often with entire paragraphs in changes going missing, other times deleted portion were reappearing, all that jazz.

LaTeX on an online collaborative environment (well-known, not naming it -this post isnt an ad) on the other hand, despite its archaic way of working, never showed any of those problems. If a table was placed somewhere, we could be sure it would never get moved to random places, and changes/rewrites would be always synced correctly (as LaTeX source is plain text, merging algorithms/CRDTs have a much easier time).

Re: Pandoc

#289

Post by maxerickson »

jrm4 wrote: post #193
2cynykyl wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also use Word for all my writing too, so wanted to defend you. People (tech people at least) have lost sight of the fact that writing should happen in "word processing software", and Word is the best-in-class. To people who say "Word sux", I say "That just means you don't know how to use Word properly". Writing any markup or markdown syntax in an IDE is a disaster for the creative process. Jack Kerouac used to type…

Word is the worst very popular program for the inverse reason of why Excel is the best; the extent to which a regular user can easily determine and or modify "why something they see on the screen appears the way it does." In Excel, you click on the cell and see either e.g. the number or formula used to get the result you see. In Word, well, it's just difficult to figure out exactly why a thing looks the way it does.

You have to find it and turn it on, but there is a tool called "Style Inspector" that shows the applied styles and direct formatting of the selected text (or the location of the cursor).

Can also use control+space to strip off any direct formatting.

Re: Pandoc

#290

Post by BrandoElFollito »

lightspot21 wrote: post #288
BrandoElFollito wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But Word for collaborative work is a nightmare Why? It has comments, tracking etc. Concurrent edition i impossible, though (even when MS says it is possible). For that Google Docs is great (or some self-hosted systems)

> Why? It has comments, tracking etc. Concurrent edition i impossible, though (even when MS says it is possible). For that Google Docs is great (or some self-hosted systems) It doesn't scale. At all. I used to work at a university lab group where all 30 of us would need to concurrently write, edit and review 150+-page, heavily technical reports with lots of diagrams and tables spanning pages. To be clear, most of the…

> all 30 of us would need to concurrently write, edit and review 150+-page

As I wrote, it does not work at all for concurrent access - I mentioned Google Docs & Co for this.

> LaTeX on an online collaborative environment (well-known, not naming it -this post isnt an ad)

I wrote my MSc and PhD thesis in LaTeX (physics) so I know how fantastic it is. You write content without caring for the container - and since changing anything is black magic you give up and do not try (which is a VERY good thing - it just works).

I never used Overleaf though (I guess that this is the product you refer to). I guess that having a concurrent system (such as etertab or something - or Overleaf if it supports truly concurrent editing) is the graal.

The drawback is that you need to know the language to cooperate. In a university setting this is not complicated, in a company - not so much.

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