[OT] Migrating from non-free programs to LibreOffice (was: "More About Unicode in Python 2 and 3")

[Grant Edwards]

On 2014-01-06, Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:

>> Right. I think shifting people to LibreOffice is an excellent and
>> realistic step toward imcreasing people's software and data freedom.
>
> Yeah. Which is why I do it. But the other night, my mum was trying to
> lay out her book in LO, and was having some problems with the system
> of having each chapter in a separate file. (Among other things, styles
> weren't shared across them all, so a tweak to a style means opening up
> every chapter and either doing a parallel edit or figuring out how to
> import styles.) So yes, it's a realistic and worthwhile step, but it's
> not a magic solution to all problems. She doesn't have time to learn a
> whole new system. Maybe - in the long term - LaTeX would actually save
> her time, but it's certainly a much harder 'sell' than LO.

Yea, I think laying out a book with something like MS Word or
LibreOffice is nuts.   Depending on her formatting needs, a
lighter-weight mark-up language (something like asciidoc) might suite:

  http://asciidoc.org/
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AsciiDoc

I've used it to write a 150 page manual, and was quite happy with the
results.  It produces DocBook XML, PDF, HTML and a few other output
formats (Including, I think, LibreOffice/OpenOffice).  It's _much_
easier to get started with than LaTeX. For printing purposes the
quality of the output is no match for TeX -- but it's better than a
"word processor", and it does a very nice job with HTML output.
  
-- 
Grant Edwards               grant.b.edwards        Yow! It's a hole all the
                                  at               way to downtown Burbank!
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