[xubuntu-users] Authoring tools: Was Is there a Linux Distro with MS Word Pre installed?

[Steve Litt]

On Fri, 13 Jan 2017 22:48:51 +0000
Peter Flynn <peter at silmaril.ie> wrote:

> On 01/13/2017 02:24 AM, pereira wrote:
> > FWIW, I use Libreoffice whenever someone in the MS Windows world
> > sends me a document in .doc or .docx format. So far I've had no
> > problems with sending them back documents made by Libreoffice and
> > exported into docx (which actually tends to shorten the file length
> > compared to Libreoffice's native format).
> > 
> > Still, I vastly prefer writing in TeX.  
> 
> Yes, I recommend LaTeX for formatting any large-scale or complex
> document. It is hugely more reliable and powerful than any
> wordprocessor, and has the advantages that it runs identically on any
> platform, and that there is a huge support ecosystem of people using
> it. It's also free software, in both senses of the phrase.
> 
> (Actually, for writing and editing a complex book or thesis, I would
> prefer XML, which can be transformed to LaTeX for formatting. But this
> is still not easy, as the XML editors out there are designed for
> experts, not for authors.)

Hi Peter and periera,

I have a germ of an idea for authoring documents in a write once, read
everywhere format.

Markdown is very limited, but what it does it does well, fast, and easy
for the author to read without conversion on every glance (or that
horror of horrors, WYSIWYG). I think I can add paragraph character
styles, within the format of Markdown, with low-distraction tags. The
result would be a Markdown doc that I could parse as XML (perhaps after
an HTML to XML conversion), with the ability to incorporate any
arbitrary character or paragraph style you want.

Although this can't, by itself, handle book specialties such as
footnotes and bibliographies, it can create (I assume) XHTML that can
easily be converted to web, ePub, or LaTeX, with all appearance ruled
by CSS or LaTeX stylesheets.

I haven't done this yet, but it looks to me like a very realistic way
to author the kind of books I write.

SteveT

Steve Litt 
December 2016 featured book: Rapid Learning for the 21st Century
http://www.troubleshooters.com/rl21