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
> http://sbc.yahoo.com

__________________________________________________
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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