LaTeX and big writing projects

[Jason White]

Michael Whapples <speakup at braille.uwo.ca> wrote:
>The wikibook on LaTeX is quite good, I tend to use that as a reference book, 
>although it does have sections which would be good for beginners as well.
>
>I have to agree with Liz though, you may come across times where the 
>expected format means using LaTeX is not possible (eg. I am studying with 
>the Open University and I must submit my project report as a word document 
>or RTF).

You can still write it in LaTeX and convert it. Tex4ht is the best package for
this. It can generate HTML, XHTML or ODF. Unoconv (which uses LibreOffice) can
take this and convert it to RTF or even MS-Word format.

Even if you need a word processor format in the end, this doesn't mean you
have to use a word processor to create it.

I think there are conversions from Docbook as well, but I haven't investigated
those. Almost everyone with whom I have ever exchanged documents has gladly
accepted either PDF or HTML.

There are other interesting formats worth mentioning also, such as Emacs
Org-mode, Mardown, RestructuredText and so on, which again are supported by
ocnversion tools.

The only situation in which I would use a word processor is one in which I had
a document with formatting that needed to be preserved, which I was
collaboratively editing with a word processor user.

At that point, LibreOffice would probably be a necessity, despite the bad
editing environment compared with Emacs or Vim.