Re: Exporting for word processors

[Paul R <paul.r.ml@gmail.com>]

Hi,

Jeffrey> Can anyone help me out? I suspect that docbook is the key, but
Jeffrey> I've tried to find an answer there and am flummoxed by the
Jeffrey> docbook documentation.

Indeed, you can use docbook and something like docbook2odf to convert to
something OpenOffice.org can read. You'll have to experiment, I really
hope this will work well because that's what docbook has been designed
for.

You can also directly write to ODT, I've done such an export filter for
emacs muse some time ago, I can't remember if I published it somewhere,
but basically it is really simple :

 - start OpenOffice and write some dummy text and apply paragraph style
   to them. Make sure you use every type of structure you will need
   later (lists, titles ...).
 - tweak your styles to suit your tastes
 - save file somewhere as template.odt
 - odt is a zipped directory, so unzip the file and look inside, you
   will find something like content.xml, read it carefully, so you will
   know how to write it later.

Now write an exporter that can be customized to use a given
« template.odt » file. It will first unzip this file, then replace
content.xml by a newly generated content.xml from your org file, then
zip back the whole directory and voila.

-- 
  Paul