convert Word/Writer docs into Lyx

[Peter Malaise]

As a Linux Mint user I got the request to translate and publish an A5 
book of some 180 pages I wrote in 2020, from my native Dutch into 
English and French. I could do it manually as I'm fluent in both, but 
there's quite some research on correct terminology to be done for each 
language and a lot of adaptations to the respective market habits; any 
time gain is welcome.

The book was written in Lyx, which I use since many years. I decided for 
machine translation and a manual correction afterwards. After some tests 
I decided to choose DeepL (I'm a subscriber). You can import long and 
complex docs there as PDF, DOCX or PPTX. As I work with LibreOffice 
Writer the export from Lyx to Writer is a piece of cake and you can save 
as DOCX directly. The return from DeepL (translation took some 2 
minutes) was quite complete, but you have to get it in Lyx again, and as 
intact as possible, to limit the time for redoing the layout of the 
whole document.

I didn't manage to do that satisfactorily, until I read the mail by 
Eberhard Lisse in this list, referring to LibreOffice and the 
Writer2Latex plugin. The plugin saved the Word text as TEX, I imported 
this in Lyx and was astonished by the result: everything was there and 
on its right place, even the Index, Table of contents and List of 
figures, even the 'blank spaces' ('big jump' vertical spacing in Lyx) 
Mathias Schmidt wrote about. The only flaw, if you like, is that Notes 
and Foot notes are all there, but within the text body, not in the footer.

Now, this was only text and the odd conventional photos and drawings, I 
can imagine that a scientific or math document might be far more 
complex. Anyway, I can't but stress how fluent the processing went, 
leaving me ample time for the corrections and adaptions.

Peter Malaise

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