A modest proposal

A modest proposal

[Christopher Cardinale]

I don't know whether I represent the "typical" ConTeXt user, but I do
come from an area where ConTeXt has an opportunity to make serious
inroads. More on that later.

As a cell biology graduate student, I don't get much choice with
respect to software. First of all, everyone uses Macs. Secondly, the
journals are quite rigid about which file formats are accepted for
electronic submission:

http://www.jbc.org/misc/ifora.shtml

Even the grant applications are in the form of a Microsoft Word
Template which you must fill out. Word is a fact of life in this field.
Moreover, there are add-ons to Word, such as EndNote
(http://www.endnote.com/), which are indispensable. If you are in the
biomedical research field you will appreciate the ability to access
Medline directly and the citation formats for every journal. Some of us
can't do without it.

What we can use, however, are robust tools for the creation of figures,
class handouts, and other documents which will be self-published.
ConTeXt can fulfill this role as a DTP program, along the lines of
QuarkXPress (only better!)

I propose the creation of a Microsoft Word Template which will make use
of Styles and Visual Basic Macros in order to aid in the conversion to
ConTeXt. This could consist of a one-step process using Visual Basic
macros, or a two-step process by which the Word document is output as a
"clean" XML or RTF file which can be easily converted to ConTeXt.
Ideally, this output could be compiled by ConTeXt on the first run, but
obviously manual tweaking in a text editor would be necessary to
achieve the desired layout.

As I mentioned, as a mere biologist and medical student I do not have
the training to carry out such a project on my own. I would be more
than happy to collaborate with others in testing, debugging,
documentation, and any other task I could contribute to. Please contact
me if you are interested in working on this project.

Thanks,
Chris Cardinale

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Re: A modest proposal

[John Culleton]

On Thursday 11 July 2002 11:23 pm, Christopher Cardinale wrote:
> I don't know whether I represent the "typical" ConTeXt user, but I do
> come from an area where ConTeXt has an opportunity to make serious
> inroads. More on that later.
>
> As a cell biology graduate student, I don't get much choice with
> respect to software. First of all, everyone uses Macs. Secondly, the
> journals are quite rigid about which file formats are accepted for
> electronic submission:
>
> http://www.jbc.org/misc/ifora.shtml
>
> Even the grant applications are in the form of a Microsoft Word
> Template which you must fill out. Word is a fact of life in this field.
> Moreover, there are add-ons to Word, such as EndNote
> (http://www.endnote.com/), which are indispensable. If you are in the
> biomedical research field you will appreciate the ability to access
> Medline directly and the citation formats for every journal. Some of us
> can't do without it.
>
> What we can use, however, are robust tools for the creation of figures,
> class handouts, and other documents which will be self-published.
> ConTeXt can fulfill this role as a DTP program, along the lines of
> QuarkXPress (only better!)
>
> I propose the creation of a Microsoft Word Template which will make use
> of Styles and Visual Basic Macros in order to aid in the conversion to
> ConTeXt. This could consist of a one-step process using Visual Basic
> macros, or a two-step process by which the Word document is output as a
> "clean" XML or RTF file which can be easily converted to ConTeXt.
> Ideally, this output could be compiled by ConTeXt on the first run, but
> obviously manual tweaking in a text editor would be necessary to
> achieve the desired layout.
>
> As I mentioned, as a mere biologist and medical student I do not have
> the training to carry out such a project on my own. I would be more
> than happy to collaborate with others in testing, debugging,
> documentation, and any other task I could contribute to. Please contact
> me if you are interested in working on this project.
>
> Thanks,
> Chris Cardinale
>

Unfortunately you ask Context to play in Quark's (and MSword's) ballpark. 
Context (or any TeX) does best with journal articles, with true footnotes, 
and not the (IMHO) miserable substitute of endnotes, with a sophisticated 
bibliography system and so on. For some reason the Redmondites have taken 
over your journals, and dislodging them will be difficult indeed. OTOH
class handouts can probably be cobbled up rather easily in MSWord (Quark 
would be overkill.) 

I convert MSWord etc. to TeX by a very simple mechanism. I take the
.doc or .pdf form of the document, reduce it to ASCII text, and start from
there. True, I lose all the formatting. But the formatting is crap anyhow. 

As an old programmer let me tell you, conversion seldom works. Just take
the specs and write from scratch in the new language.  The basic mechanisms
of Context are too different for useful transliteration from all that other 
stuff. If you could reduce the MSWord stuff tho XML there might be some 
hope.  But it would still be ugly Context at the end of the stream.

Remember too that Context is bleeding edge stuff, basically an Alpha product.
Development goes forth at a tremendous pace, but lots of things don't work 
yet, or aren't documented yet.  It is the TeX of the future, but may not be 
your best choice as the TeX of the present. You might be better off 
introducing a more stable (if less attractive) flavor of TeX.  Take a look at 
Texsis, a less well known but useful macro package that was written by and 
for physicists. It is like Context an integrated package without all the 
style-chasing that torments LaTeX users.

Just my 2 Euros :-)

John Culleton

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RE: A modest proposal

[Duncan Hothersall]

> As an old programmer let me tell you, conversion seldom works. Just take
> the specs and write from scratch in the new language.  The basic
> mechanisms
> of Context are too different for useful transliteration from all
> that other
> stuff. If you could reduce the MSWord stuff tho XML there might be some
> hope.  But it would still be ugly Context at the end of the stream.

I use ConTeXt as one pagination solution for a workflow that goes
Word->RTF->XML->PDF. Automated conversion is particularly suitable where the
original Word files use a consistent set of styles, but it is useable even
without that. There are a finite number of ways in which Word can represent
something like an ordered list, and once you have all of those sorts of
things accounted for you can plough through the data.

The important thing is to know what is your data and what is just an
intermediate format. For me, ConTeXt is just an intermediate format which
can be regenerated on demand from the XML master. Ugliness of the generated
ConTeXt is therefore not a concern.

We have something in the region of 12 million words of academic course
content that has gone through this sort of workflow (mostly paginating using
plain TeX rather than ConTeXt) so it does work!

Re: A modest proposal

[Hans Hagen]

At 08:30 AM 7/12/2002 -0400, John Culleton wrote:

>Unfortunately you ask Context to play in Quark's (and MSword's) ballpark.
>Context (or any TeX) does best with journal articles, with true footnotes,

actually, much of my current work concerns replacing quark flows by context 
ones -)

Hans
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Re: A modest proposal---addendum

[John Culleton]

On Thursday 11 July 2002 11:23 pm, Christopher Cardinale wrote:
> I don't know whether I represent the "typical" ConTeXt user, but I do
> come from an area where ConTeXt has an opportunity to make serious
> inroads. More on that later.
>
> As a cell biology graduate student, I don't get much choice with
> respect to software. First of all, everyone uses Macs. Secondly, the
> journals are quite rigid about which file formats are accepted for
> electronic submission:
>
> http://www.jbc.org/misc/ifora.shtml
>
> Even the grant applications are in the form of a Microsoft Word
> Template which you must fill out. Word is a fact of life in this field.
> Moreover, there are add-ons to Word, such as EndNote
> (http://www.endnote.com/), which are indispensable. If you are in the
> biomedical research field you will appreciate the ability to access
> Medline directly and the citation formats for every journal. Some of us
> can't do without it.
>
> What we can use, however, are robust tools for the creation of figures,
> class handouts, and other documents which will be self-published.
> ConTeXt can fulfill this role as a DTP program, along the lines of
> QuarkXPress (only better!)
>
> I propose the creation of a Microsoft Word Template which will make use
> of Styles and Visual Basic Macros in order to aid in the conversion to
> ConTeXt. This could consist of a one-step process using Visual Basic
> macros, or a two-step process by which the Word document is output as a
> "clean" XML or RTF file which can be easily converted to ConTeXt.
> Ideally, this output could be compiled by ConTeXt on the first run, but
> obviously manual tweaking in a text editor would be necessary to
> achieve the desired layout.
>
> As I mentioned, as a mere biologist and medical student I do not have
> the training to carry out such a project on my own. I would be more
> than happy to collaborate with others in testing, debugging,
> documentation, and any other task I could contribute to. Please contact
> me if you are interested in working on this project.
>
> Thanks,
> Chris Cardinale

Shoot first, ask questions later, that's my style :-) After my inital response
I reviewed the guidelines for your journal submissions as referenced above,
and found you forgot to mention a key fact. The articles are to be submitted 
as a pdf file. Thus, the way is open to emulate the desired format in any 
typesetting system you choose.  In fact, given a published copy of the
journal, a good typesetter could put a new article in the same format 
and the recipients would be none the wiser. I just did a job on a technical
journal where half the submissions were in MSWord and half in LaTeX.
I worked on the LaTeX half, changing typefaces, modernizing usage etc.

I had inferred that the articles were submitted as doc files. My mistake.

Cheers,

John Culleton
>
>
>
> __________________________________________________
> Do You Yahoo!?
> Sign up for SBC Yahoo! Dial - First Month Free
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Re: A modest proposal

[Eckhart Guthöhrlein]

Chris,

maybe these pages can help you:
http://www-lsi.upc.es/~valiente/journals.html and
http://www.lecb.ncifcrf.gov/~toms/latex.html.
There are LaTeX styles for many journals, unfortunately not for JBC. But
since JBC accepts documents in PDF format, a layout according to the
specifications is sufficient, MS Word format is not needed (as John
pointed out already).
EndNote also supports BibTeX export, so you can use it with LaTeX and
ConTeXt. Under Linux, there is Pybliographer with direct Medline access:
http://www.gnome.org/softwaremap/projects/pybliographer/.
But I must agree with you that it is difficult to avoid Word & Co in our
field.

Eckhart

Re: A modest proposal

[Hans Hagen]

At 11:28 PM 7/12/2002 +0200, Henning Hraban Ramm wrote:
>Am Freitag, 12. Juli 2002 16:54 schrieb Bruce D'Arcus:
> > am more concerned with going the other way: taking a ConTeXt document
> > (or even better, the PDF produced with it) and converting to rtf (or
> > maybe html; or xml I guess, since supposedly Word can read xml docs)...
>
>Acrobat can export XML and RTF. But it's very poor, if you don't have a 
>Tagged
>PDF (the TPDF produced by MakeAccessible ist not sufficient).
>It should be no problem for pdfTeX to tag its PDF (that is, to add XML
>structure), but I fear I can't tell HTT how to do it...
>
>Or could it be done by ConTeXt? (Don't know which PDF specials are needed.)

could probably be done, but has a low priority

Hans
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                                   Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE | pragma@wxs.nl
                       Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands
  tel: +31 (0)38 477 53 69 | fax: +31 (0)38 477 53 74 | www.pragma-ade.com
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Re: A modest proposal

[Bruce D'Arcus]

Henning Hraban Ramm wrote:

>Am Freitag, 12. Juli 2002 16:54 schrieb Bruce D'Arcus:
>> am more concerned with going the other way: taking a ConTeXt document
>> (or even better, the PDF produced with it) and converting to rtf (or
>> maybe html; or xml I guess, since supposedly Word can read xml docs)...
>
>Acrobat can export XML and RTF. But it's very poor, if you don't have a 
Tagged
>PDF (the TPDF produced by MakeAccessible ist not sufficient).
>It should be no problem for pdfTeX to tag its PDF (that is, to add XML
>structure), but I fear I can't tell HTT how to do it...

Yes please!!!  I'm kind of surprised pdftex doesn't support this yet, 
but it would be a nice addition, since any publisher likely to insist 
on rtf/Word would likely have Acrobat installed...

Bruce

Re: A modest proposal

[Henning Hraban Ramm]

Am Freitag, 12. Juli 2002 16:54 schrieb Bruce D'Arcus:
> am more concerned with going the other way: taking a ConTeXt document
> (or even better, the PDF produced with it) and converting to rtf (or
> maybe html; or xml I guess, since supposedly Word can read xml docs)...

Acrobat can export XML and RTF. But it's very poor, if you don't have a Tagged 
PDF (the TPDF produced by MakeAccessible ist not sufficient).
It should be no problem for pdfTeX to tag its PDF (that is, to add XML 
structure), but I fear I can't tell HTT how to do it...

Or could it be done by ConTeXt? (Don't know which PDF specials are needed.)

Grüßlis vom Hraban!
-- 
http://www.angerweit.de
http://www.fiee.net
http://www.ramm.ch
---

Re: A modest proposal

[Samuel Lacas]

Hi,

Bruce D'Arcus a écrit 1.2K le Fri, Jul 12, 2002 at 10:54:35AM -0400:
# 
# John Culleton wrote:
# 
# >stuff. If you could reduce the MSWord stuff tho XML there might be some 
# >hope.  But it would still be ugly Context at the end of the stream.
# 
# I've been thinking about this issue quite a bit.  I currently use 
# Word/Endnote for serious academic work.  

No one should use Word for serious kind of work :)

# While it is feasible to map much of a Word document onto the structures 
# of LaTeX/ConTeXt and it would be nice if such a script was available,

I do not know what can be done with the following, but the produced
XML seems quite clean: OpenOffice is an open source suite that can
read (and write) rather impressive Word documents, and it uses XML
as it native format.

Otherwise, I assume that anyone with enough courage and time (I really
think it could be done in a month or less) may write a Word->XML
translating utility using the COM API (I myself use the Python COM
binding and interpreter as a replacement for VB). Alas, I think that
what I'm saying is chinese to you if you do not have some programmer
background with those; but may be a nice guy may do it for you :)

2 euro cents,

sL

Re: A modest proposal

[Bruce D'Arcus]

John Culleton wrote:

>As an old programmer let me tell you, conversion seldom works. Just take
>the specs and write from scratch in the new language.  The basic 
mechanisms
>of Context are too different for useful transliteration from all that 
other 
>stuff. If you could reduce the MSWord stuff tho XML there might be some 
>hope.  But it would still be ugly Context at the end of the stream.

I've been thinking about this issue quite a bit.  I currently use 
Word/Endnote for serious academic work.  Since I am in the social 
sciences, I need to be able to produce Word or rtf docs that perfectly 
preserve two things: the structure of the document (for me section 
headings, footnotes, text, etc.) and complex bibliographic formatting 
specific to different journals.  I have yet to figure out how to do 
both of these at the same time in the TeX world, which is why I have 
yet to switch.  

While it is feasible to map much of a Word document onto the structures 
of LaTeX/ConTeXt and it would be nice if such a script was available, I 
am more concerned with going the other way: taking a ConTeXt document 
(or even better, the PDF produced with it) and converting to rtf (or 
maybe html; or xml I guess, since supposedly Word can read xml docs)...

Bruce

Re: A modest proposal

[Christopher Cardinale]

Graham and John,

On reflection I realize that you are both absolutely right. My thinking
was that ConTeXt would make an excellent replacement for Quark,
InDesign, or PageMaker because I love the look of its output (paragraph
breaking, justification, etc) and because of its structured-document
features. I am thinking of writing a lab manual where I will compile
all of my protocols, and this seems like the right tool for the job to
ensure an aesthetically pleasing results and consistency of format. I
am also looking for something to write my thesis with, and I am
hesitant to use Word for exactly the reason you've specified --- it has
a tendency to eat your document. When I used Word to write my undergrad
thesis, I avoided the problem by creating a separate document for each
section (abstract, methods, intro, etc).

I used to use Scientific Word. It's nice for some things, but it seems
to me that if you want to work with LaTeX the best way is to edit the
text file directly; it's not bad once you get used to it. I started
teaching myself ConTeXt (having printed out about 500 pages worth of
Hans's documentation) and I love the concept, but as John pointed out,
it's still at an "alpha" stage. For instance, I can't get the whole
font thing figured out for anything!

Thanks for your remarks.

-- Chris Cardinale

--- Graham Wilson <grahamwilsonca@yahoo.ca> wrote:
> I have a few questions for you:
> (1) What is it about ConTeXt that you like?
> (2) What is it about your current system of
>     Word/EndNote that you don't like?
> (3) What do you hope to accomplish in moving to a
>     Word/Endnote + ConTeXt hybrid?
> (4) Have you thought of using Adobe FrameMaker or
>     Scientific Word?

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