I'm building a brand new product mobile and web for people collaborating on complex documents and thinking of using latex format for internal document representation. I'd like to use an open source library for word2latex and latex to pdf/word conversion. Can someone recommend a library that I could use within my java/scala backend running on linux?
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3Welcome aboard! Is there any non-open source library? Regarding the conversion from LaTeX to word, see this question. A "conversion" from latex to pdf is simply called compilling your source document with pdflatex. – Clément May 21 '15 at 22:28
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4If it was me, I'd use Markdown internally and convert to PDF, Word, etc. with Pandoc. – Mike Renfro May 21 '15 at 22:52
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1I second Mike Renfro's recommendation, as Markdown is much easier to teach to a non-LaTeX audience. – R. Schumacher May 21 '15 at 22:59
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@MikeRenfro I would be keen to use Pandoc too, but the GPL licence might be a problem. http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLInProprietarySystem – twsh May 22 '15 at 00:40
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1How complex? Markdown is not ideal for complex documents (but look up GPP for some help there), and no conversion to TeX is likely to take advantage of what TeX can do. And converting from Word to TeX to Word is, if anything in this world is, surely crazy. – jon May 22 '15 at 00:41
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Still, Markdown (or just about any other text-based format) is better than LaTeX if you want to reliably convert to closed formats like Word's. (I know that they opened it up, but at a thousand pages, it's not exactly transparent.) My personal recommendation would be something like DocBook (or some other XML/SGML-based format). For internal representation of structured data, I don't think it gets much better. – Sean Allred May 22 '15 at 00:53
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Given a non-GPL license, Python docutils (license) may be as close as you can get. Uses reStructuredText instead of Markdown, converts to ODT instead of DOCX. – Mike Renfro May 22 '15 at 14:28