Hi Martin,
The best solution I found so far is to export to latex, and then use
pandoc to convert the tex document into word. You can point pandoc to
your .bib file, so the bibliography gets into the word document, doing
something like this:
pandoc --bibliography /home/julian/Documents/org_files/myrefs.bib -o
mypaper.docx mypaper.tex
This works ok. Figures sometimes do not get inserted into the Word document,
and there are other relatively minor issues. I have not bother looking
very deeply to figure out if they can be solved, I just pass the word
document to my collaborators for editing (so they can use the track
changes options and so for), and I also send the pdf file (from latex)
so they can see exactly how the document would look, in terms of figures
and tables.
When you get your reviews back, you need to manually insert them into
your org document, which is a pain in the back.
An alternative way is to pass the org document to your coworker, so they
can edit them in word directly. They should ignore all the markup
language, do not use the track changes option, and save the resulting
document as a text file. Then you can incorporate the changes directly
into your org file using ediff. But as you said, the markup language
may turn off people that are not very friendly to some code and strange
commands.
A third way would be to export to odt. I think you can set the exporter
so it uses libre office to convert the resulting file into .doc or
.docx. I have not tried this very well, so I am not sure how this works
with references, figures and tables.
Hopefully somebody on the list may have a better option,
All the best,
Julian
Martin Leduc writes:
Hi orgers,
People using org-mode or LaTeX to write scientific papers inevitably
face problems when time comes to share a manuscript with co-authors for
reviewing. Unless one decides to restrict the choice of his co-authors
based exclusively on their knowledge of LaTeX, collaborators generally
use Microsoft Word to write their documents.
One way to share LaTeX documents with non-LaTeX users is to simply
copy-paste the LaTeX file into a Word document. You can then share this
file with other people along with a pdf-compiled version of the
manuscript allowing them to see all references, bibliography, equations
and figures. This is the most convenient approach for the first author,
who can simply copy-paste back the text into a tex file after the rounds
of review and then compile the LaTeX manuscript again following some
minor debugging.
However, the latter approach may not be suitable in situations where the
document is intended to stay into a word format for whatever reason. It
could be for instance because you want to be kind with some co-authors
that wouldn't pay much interest into a scary document filled with
complicated codes.
So I would like to know what are the best known strategies to circumvent
the latter issue. To simplify, I accept that I will need to rewrite the
equations (and eq. numbers) in the Word document. What I really want,
however, is all the citations and the list of references being managed
automatically at the step of exporting from org to ODT or to Plain Text.
The only solution I see now is to export the org document to a plain pdf
(e.g. with no page numbers) and then to copy-paste the pdf into a Word
document. This strategy is cumbersome because a lot of work is generally
needed to format the word document (page wrapping, no line breaks
between paragraphs, words hyphenation, etc).
Is there any cleaner solutions to this issue ? Or more general ideas on
how we could facilitate the sharing of documents containing a bibtex
bibliography between org and non-org users ?
Thanks
Martin