grumble grumble grumble

[kaberett]

I am at the stage I eventually get to with every paper to date, where my supervisors want to Look At It and are Not Interested in dealing with LaTeX, where I much prefer to work in it, so now I'm gradually moving everything over into LibreOffice with reference to about three different files, and I know I bring this on myself but I really prefer LaTeX for early drafting.

Comments

[ewt]

Oh FFS.

Send them a .txt file and be done with it.

(Um, don't actually? I'm assuming that if this was the right thing to do you would have done it, etc.)

[kaberett]

yup!

but also there's... you know the editing technique of copying everything out word-by-word, from hand to type or from type to a new window? well, I'm not QUITE doing that (and also I'm underslept), but transcribing LaTeX --> .doc is a similar principle...

[ursula]

Because LaTeX is obviously superior!

I suppose there's no way to sell them on a way to comment on PDFs?

[alatefeline]

Makes sense. Sorry that it's such a pain.

[davidgillon]

So ewt suggested .txt, and ursula PDF, I'd go totally old school and give them a printout to markup to their heart's content ;)

[emperor]

Ugh, how annoying. I dealt with this with my PhD supervisors by sending them hard-copy to scribble upon.

...but then I still use LaTeX for anything more than the very simple things I do in Org-Mode, so I am an outlier here...

[kaberett]

ALAS this would involve me posting shit to Durham, which takes longer than 30 seconds and also a good deal more organisation. :-p

[silveradept]

I gather from the comments that there are no easy conversion tools between LaTeX and the more conventional office documents. Which seems a shame and an oddity.

[cesy]

Yes, this. Surely someone has invented a decent LaTeX to .docx converter by now? LaTeX is so handy!

[kaberett]

In my experience, (1) converters tend to get most of the text, but drop formatting and unusual characters on the floor (because they're basically running OCR over the PDF), and (2) my supervisor can't open .docx usefully because she's running a decade-old version of Office for Mac.

(It's possible that I exaggerate slightly with the "decade", but not by much.)

[kaberett]

Having said which, TeX4HT might do what I need it to...

[mdlbear]

Or look into latex2html.

[mdlbear]

Basically script the process of LaTeX -> HTML -> Word/LibreOffice. IIRC Libreoffice can be run in batch mode from a command line. Trying to extract text in any useful form from a PDF that TeX has generated is hopeless -- a lot of TeX's adjustments for kerning etc. get mixed in with the text stream.

latex2html -split 0 -no_navigation -info 0 whatever.tex

[sebenikela]

oh ugh

i have been refusing to learn latex for ...more than a decade now, but the "how to make this something supervisors can read" problem is familiar.

[kareila]

Oh gosh, when I was at MIT everyone used LaTeX. I still have several LaTeX reference books.

[cadenzamuse]

Yeah, my first advisor got his PhD at MIT and wanted everyone to send him things in LaTeX, which was basically the same problem in reverse for me...

[mdlbear]

Can't you just send them a PDF? (It's what I do in most cases. Sometimes I can use latex2html.)

[kaberett]

Nope, I have alas been crabbily reminded that my supervisor vastly prefers working off Word documents to pdfs.