Martin Paul Eve bio photo

Martin Paul Eve

Professor of Literature, Technology and Publishing at Birkbeck, University of London

Email Books Twitter Github Stackoverflow MLA CORE Institutional Repo Hypothes.is ORCID ID  ORCID iD Wikipedia Pictures for Re-Use

In my quest to create a set of free and open tools for platinum, scholar-run OA journals, I've just committed a crude, provisional script to my meXml git repository that assists with typesetting into pseudo-NLM format.

A few notes. First of all, what does it do? The script parses markup output from the wysihtml5 tool and converts it into near-as-damnit the format I need for typesetting. The idea is that I paste a LibreOffice document (with endnotes, not footnotes) into the tool, and grab the markup it returns. This python script then parses it one step further into the format that I need to generate galleys for Orbit with the /tools/gengalleys.sh tool. I still have to clean up the markup, but this has reduced the time it takes to typeset down from about 6-8 hours to about 2 hours.

Is this the best way to do it? Almost certainly not. Why? Because the way to do it properly would be to create a set of LibreOffice styles (or whatever mechanism it uses) and then get their tool to directly output in the format that's needed. It's also the case that I have broken compatibility with NLM standards (at present) in my implementation. This is something that I aim to gradually fix; I needed to break it at the time to Just Get It Done (trademark).

Is the script complete? Nope. It's pretty sloppy coding, too. Again, this is a dirty hack that I've committed in case it helps somebody.

Disclaimers done: enjoy!