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Re: OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX (Was: Tool for document management)

judd@wadsworth.org wrote:

On 26 Sep, Peter Robinson wrote:


...

If you write in latex you can always convert to RTF via latex2rtf,
which in my experience works excellently. If needed, it is no big
deal to convert this to word format. It is definitely worth the
effort to learn latex.
cheers, peter




     I disagree.  I use latex for some articles which are submitted to
scientific journals, but for the type of writing which Steve has
described, Oo.org is fine, with no learning curve, and he can output it
to .doc or.rtf as necessary.  If he wants to have an index, or
bibliograpy, footnotes, etc. in the book, it´s definitely worth learning
to use latex or some variant.
If revision history, etc, is necessary or really desirable, using lyx and subversion, as other posters suggested, might be a good way to 
go; I haven´t used lyx myself for several years, so I´m dont´t know how
easy it would be for him to use.
I write all my texts in latex, use JabRef/bibtex to manage references, subversion to keep track of things and to collaborate with coauthors, and -- if I need to submit to a journal misguided enough only to accept word, latex2rtf. Gone are the days of hundreds of different versions of a manuscript as separate word files. Gone are the days when EndNote kept "loosing" my references or word kept screwing up almost anything. Things have become simply EASIER and I have more time to do real work, as opposed to secretarial/editorial chores. 
The time I invested to learn all this has been repaid at least 50 times.
Even if Steve or others have different needs, I submit that they too will benefit from latex/SVN etc for document management, the cost of rethinking a few work steps is truly minor.. 

just my 2c :- }
-peter
-Chris 
------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   Christopher Judd, Ph. D.                      judd@wadsworth.org   |
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