Escaping from diabolical software

[rebeccmeister]

So the main course I'll be teaching this fall again is a course my department has nicknamed "Scientific Writing." For the course, we use a book written by a Tufts professor called A Short Guide to Writing about Biology. It's a great book for the purpose, but over the years as the course has evolved faculty came to realize they had opinions about certain disciplinary-specific conventions that weren't emphasized or covered in Pechenik's book. (see, e.g., use of piratical statistical software language)

Eventually, those conventions evolved into a course pack handout we call "Guidelines."

Now, this is all well and good, except that this is not a small course pack. In the long term I would really love to convert it into a TeX file, but in the short term the notion is daunting because the various versions of the document were created using Diabolical Word-Processing Software by, shall we call it, a company known as VeryTinyNotHard (VTNH). This VeryTinyNotHard software program has a habit of adding a whole bunch of invisible gibberish to every file it creates.

I have spent the past week trying to wrestle this thing into submission so that I can hand students a booklet with a reasonably accurate table of contents, page numbers in logical locations, and activities embedded throughout so they are forced to turn past the pages full of extremely useful information, etc etc.

It is finally done. I have printed out a full proof. It is 181 pages long.

It is also still very ugly because it was made using the Diabolical Word-Processing Software, which is inherently very ugly.

I tried to install a program that might do a crude conversion of this soup into something digestible into LaTeX, but at this point it appears that my El Capitan may be far enough out-of-date that I'm in The Abyss. (I'm mostly in The Abyss because you'll have to tear my Mud Brick Creative Suite 5 from my cold, dead hands, although I know I know I should really just use the Open-Sores alternatives).

Anyway, that made for a tedious, exhausting week, especially because the VeryTinyNotHard software ate entire chunks of the file at one point.

Oh well.

Comments

[graydon]

Speaking as someone who knows far more than is good for them about the innards of the file format used by Diabolical Word Processing software, you may want to look at Pandoc which is a strictly command line tool for converting various document formats. Notably, it can convert Diabolical Word-Processing Software format to LaTex. (I have never tried that particular variant; when I use it, it mostly gets used to convert Markdown into other things. But LaTeX and Diabolical are both bi-directional plugins, so it's certainly worth a try.)

[rebeccmeister]

Yeah, I tried to install Pandoc but ran into issues during install because this computer is a bit old and creaky (I think I had some Xcode issue; I ran out of mental bandwidth after giving it a try, though, so I could be totally wrong). I should revisit it, though, because it looks promising!

[graydon]

May it go well!

I have no experience of Macs at all, so I can't even comment on your install woes.

[larryhammer]

That sounds like just about every conversion I've ever done from VeryTinyNotHard Diabolical Word-Processing Software to something else.

ProTip: It sometimes helps the conversion if you first export to another format, such as RTF. (Of course, you have to confirm that the exported version hasn't lost any essential elements or formats.)