I hate Word

I just hate Word.

Did I tell you I just hate Word? My school requires that everyone turns in their thesis and most of their essays, reports and whatnot in Word (.docx) files. Well, technically I’m allowed to turn in a PDF, but we only get a valid template file in a monstrous .docx with dozens of overlapping styles and settings.

Therefore I’m testing a few workflows and tools like Pandoc and Zotero for scientific writing in order to:

• do the actual writing in a text editor of my choice
• keep bibliography in a bibliography application
• use the Word template file as a template file for conversion only
• keep the text, template and bibliography files in version control
• …and finally, convert the text file with bibliography and citations in to Word format and add final touches to make it formally acceptable.

This should make the writing process a bit more bearable. I know that if I would make a proper LaTeX template file to replace the Word monstrosity I could almost altogether skip the final step of adding front-, toc- and abstract pages and whatnot, but RIGHT NOW I can’t do it well and fast enough for it to seem profitable to me.

Also, DISCLAIMER: This is not (yet, at least) a guide how to do it, but rather a couple notes for my own reference.

For more information, please see Chris Krycho’s blog post and Pandoc User Manual -Citations

Needful Things:

What we need to produce a half decent .docx file with text editor, Pandoc & bibliography application are (I’m using SublimeText & Zotero for now):

• a markdown textSource.md file for text content with citation keys picked from bibliography
• a bibliography bibliography.bib file –exported from Zotero in BetterBiBLaTex format (Zotero needed a plugin for that)
• a citation style harvard1.csl file to render citations –in this case I’ve initially used Harvard Reference format 1 (author-date)
• a reference template.docx file for styles of final document (sadly, Pandoc does not take page layout from .docx reference file so I may have to rustle up my own LaTeX reference file for that) Note that you may name your files any way you like, but since we’re using a command line tool like Pandoc let’s not use spaces in file names. Also, special characters, dashes, dots and all things fancy should be avoided. :)

Needful Commands I’ve used:

pandoc textSource.md -f markdown -t docx --reference-docx=template.docx --toc -o output.docx

↑ Which is to test that I can use a reference template.docx with textSource.md file in order to produce a new output.docx file that has the contents of textSource.md file with styles taken from reference template.docx. NOTE: with Word (.docx) reference file only styles will be applied to the resulting file and NOT the page format/layout, front page, table of contents, etc.

pandoc revelation.md --smart --standalone \
--bibliography /Users/chris/Dropbox/writing/library.bib \
--csl=/Users/chris/Dropbox/writing/chicago.csl -o revelation.docx

↑ Which is (from Chris Krycho’s blog post) to be used as a reference how to apply a bibliography file in .bib format (in my case, BetterBiBLaTeX exported from Zotero).

pandoc source/textSource.md --smart --standalone --bibliography=bib/bibliography.bib --csl=style/harvard1.csl -o output/tPolvinenOutput.docx

↑ Which is to produce a .docx file from content in textSource.md file combined with bibliography in bibliography.bib file. Note the folders source, bib and style where text source, bibliography and style files are located in and that the final file will be in output folder. You may put them anywhere you like, just write the paths in the command.

TL;DR

The Pandoc command…

pandoc source/textSource.md --smart --standalone --bibliography=bib/bibliography.bib --csl=style/harvard1.csl --reference-docx=template/template.docx -o output/output.docx

↑ …which will produce a final(ish) output.docx file from content in textSource.md file combined with bibliography in bibliography.bib file, with styles from reference file template.docx.

pandoc source/Tutkimusraportti.md --smart --standalone --bibliography bib/agri.bib --csl=style/harvard1.csl --reference-docx=template/template.docx -o output/tPolvinenTutkimusraporttiZ.docx

↑ For my own reference, the command with my own files & folder structure. See my Github repo Agri.