Org + MS DOC

[Ken Mankoff <mankoff@gmail.com>]

Hi,

There is occasional discussion on the list (or SE or Reddit) about how to best work with Word documents. In the past I've suggested Org -> Pandoc -> DOCX because that worked best for me when producing documents with equations, figures and tables. It didn't work great, but it worked best.

I've recently found a new workflow that seems much better, and wanted to let others know about it. It removes the need for Pandoc and only uses Org and LibreOffice.

1) Export to DOC (not DOCX) via ODT. Inline \(math\) in DOCX still looks pretty bad, but is fine in DOC.

(require 'ox-odt)
(setq org-odt-preferred-output-format "doc")
(setq org-odt-convert-processes '(("LibreOffice" "/Applications/LibreOffice.app/Contents/MacOS/soffice --headless --convert-to %f%x %i"))))

2) Run the following LibreOffice Macro to clean things up. I've assigned this to a toolbar button to make it easy to access. Add strings you want to disappear to "mTeXStringsNO" and pairs of strings you want converted to the "mTeXStringsCNV" arrays.

3) Email to Word Users. I always email the PDF copy to so they can see the (psuedo)canonical version of the document.

I hope this is helpful to some of you,

  -k.




Sub ReplaceTeXStrings
  Dim mTeXStringsNO(99) As String
  Dim mTeXStringsCNVfrom(99) As String
  Dim mTexStringsCNVto(99) As String
  Dim n As Long
  Dim oDocument As Object
  Dim oReplace As Object

  mTeXStringsNO() = Array("\(", "\)", "\ref", "\mathrm", _
  		"\begin{equation}", "\end{equation}", "\left", "\right", _
  		"\singlespacing", "\doublespacing")
  		
  mTeXStringsCNV() = Array("\sigma","σ", "\rho","ρ", "\sum","∑", _
   "\phi","ɸ", "\partial","∂", "^{th}","th", "^{{th}}","th", _
   "^{-1}","-1", "^{-2}","-2")
   		
  oDocument = ThisComponent
  oReplace = oDocument.createReplaceDescriptor
  For n = lbound(mTeXStringsNO()) To ubound(mTeXStringsNO())
    oReplace.SearchString = mTexStringsNO(n)
    oReplace.ReplaceString = ""
    oDocument.replaceAll(oReplace)
  Next n
  For n = lbound(mTeXStringsCNV()) To ubound(mTeXStringsCNV()) Step 2
    oReplace.SearchString = mTexStringsCNV(n)
    oReplace.ReplaceString = mTexStringsCNV(n+1)
    oDocument.replaceAll(oReplace)
  Next n
  End Sub