Re: Sharing documents with bibtex bibliography from org to non-org users

[Martin Leduc <ldcmrtn@gmail.com>]

Hi Julian, thank you for the suggestion. I didn't know pandoc, and 
didn't expect to find something so near from what I was searching !

Converting the tex file to docx using pandoc, I can see the correct 
citations and bibliography, and even equations (in openoffice, haven't 
tested it with Microsoft word) and figures. I see minor issues such as 
the equation numbers that are not compiled (references stay as labels), 
but overall it is quite satisfying.

On the other hand, exporting from org to odt is more or less like 
copy-pasting latex source code (no references, no bibliography, but... 
figures !)

All the best,

Martin




On 08/16/2016 11:16 AM, Julian M. Burgos wrote:
> Hi Martin,
>
> The best solution I found so far is to export to latex, and then use
> pandoc to convert the tex document into word.  You can point pandoc to
> your .bib file, so the bibliography gets into the word document, doing
> something like this:
>
> pandoc --bibliography /home/julian/Documents/org_files/myrefs.bib -o mypaper.docx mypaper.tex
>
> This works ok.  Figures sometimes do not get inserted into the Word document,
> and there are other relatively minor issues.  I have not bother looking
> very deeply to figure out if they can be solved, I just pass the word
> document to my collaborators for editing (so they can use the track
> changes options and so for), and I also send the pdf file (from latex)
> so they can see exactly how the document would look, in terms of figures
> and tables.
>
> When you get your reviews back, you need to manually insert them into
> your org document, which is a pain in the back.
>
> An alternative way is to pass the org document to your coworker, so they
> can edit them in word directly.  They should ignore all the markup
> language, do not use the track changes option, and save the resulting
> document as a text file.  Then you can incorporate the changes directly
> into your org file using ediff.  But as you said, the markup language
> may turn off people that are not very friendly to some code and strange
> commands.
>
> A third way would be to export to odt.  I think you can set the exporter
> so it uses libre office to convert the resulting file into .doc or
> .docx.  I have not tried this very well, so I am not sure how this works
> with references, figures and tables.
>
> Hopefully somebody on the list may have a better option,
>
> All the best,
>
> Julian
>
> Martin Leduc writes:
>
>> Hi orgers,
>>
>> People using org-mode or LaTeX to write scientific papers inevitably
>> face problems when time comes to share a manuscript with co-authors for
>> reviewing. Unless one decides to restrict the choice of his co-authors
>> based exclusively on their knowledge of LaTeX, collaborators generally
>> use Microsoft Word to write their documents.
>>
>> One way to share LaTeX documents with non-LaTeX users is to simply
>> copy-paste the LaTeX file into a Word document. You can then share this
>> file with other people along with a pdf-compiled version of the
>> manuscript allowing them to see all references, bibliography, equations
>> and figures. This is the most convenient approach for the first author,
>> who can simply copy-paste back the text into a tex file after the rounds
>> of review and then compile the LaTeX manuscript again following some
>> minor debugging.
>>
>> However, the latter approach may not be suitable in situations where the
>> document is intended to stay into a word format for whatever reason. It
>> could be for instance because you want to be kind with some co-authors
>> that wouldn't pay much interest into a scary document filled with
>> complicated codes.
>>
>> So I would like to know what are the best known strategies to circumvent
>> the latter issue. To simplify, I accept that I will need to rewrite the
>> equations (and eq. numbers) in the Word document. What I really want,
>> however, is all the citations and the list of references being managed
>> automatically at the step of exporting from org to ODT or to Plain Text.
>>
>> The only solution I see now is to export the org document to a plain pdf
>> (e.g. with no page numbers) and then to copy-paste the pdf into a Word
>> document. This strategy is cumbersome because a lot of work is generally
>> needed to format the word document (page wrapping, no line breaks
>> between paragraphs, words hyphenation, etc).
>>
>> Is there any cleaner solutions to this issue ? Or more general ideas on
>> how we could facilitate the sharing of documents containing a bibtex
>> bibliography between org and non-org users ?
>>
>> Thanks
>>
>> Martin
>