Markdown -> pandoc -> PDF, smart quotes not converted - latex

My source text uses straight quotes, which pandoc converts to ``LaTeX quotes'', but those are coming through without being converted to smart quotes. I've even used the --smart option, with no change. I thought this was automatic, but apparently not. I can't find anything in my template file that looks like it would disable this. Is there another setting somewhere?

I can't find anything in my template file that looks like it would disable this.
This sounds like you have a custom template file? In this case, you might want to enable csquotes support by putting \usepackage{csquotes} into the template. Pandoc will then generate \enquote{LaTeX quotes} which might be more portable.

Related

Maintaining GREP variables through find and replace

I've recently taken on a project of document conversion to HTML. That is, a client gives me a .DOC file, and I need to convert the contents to one long HTML file - no styling, no CSS, just clean HTML with paragraph tags, header tags tags, etc.
I found an application that does a pretty good job of automating the first part of it. The problem is that I need to do some advanced find and replace based on strings using variables.
For instance, I have footnotes that were converted properly. They're currently displayed as superscript numbers with the
I'd like to change how the footnote is displayed. Instead of a superscript number 6 for the 6th footnote, I'd like it to show (Note 6)
To do that on the entire document (hundreds of footnotes), I'm wondering if I can do something like:
FIND:
<sup><a name="FN[0-9]" href="FNR[0-9]">[0-9]</a></sup>
REPLACE:
<a name="FN%1" href="FNR%2">(Note %3)</a>
The problem is, I can't find a Find and Replace tool that lets me maintain the variables in the replace area. All I get is the superscript 6 appearing as (Note %3), as well as every other footnote doing the same thing.
Anyone have any ideas on how I can accomplish my task efficiently?
In Perl it would look roughly like this on the command line (I have NOT tested this):
perl -i -p -e's{<sup><a name="(FN\d)" href="(FNR\d)">(\d)</a></sup>}{<a name="$1" href="$2">(Note $3)</a>}' filenames....
-i says "Edit this file in place", -p means "print each line after we do whatever is in the -e switch".
That's assuming you're only looking for a single digit where you have [0-9]. If you want to match FN427, then you change (FN\d) to (FN\d+), for example.
This also assumes that the HTML that are you parsing looks EXACTLY LIKE THAT. If you get some HTML that is <a href=... name=... (with the attributes in opposite order than you have) then it will break. In that case, you'll want to use an HTML parser.
I hope that gives you enough to start with.

Odt file, shown with all styles

I'm using odt file as some kind of template and Libre Office as tool to create this template. It usually works fine except one thing.
Let assume our odt file has a paragraph of text.
There is my text.
XML file may or may not look (seems random) like this (messy, not very good thing for for parsing or as a template):
<text:p text:style-name="P7">There is</text:p><text:p text:style-name="P7"> my text<text:p text:style-name="P7">.</text:p></text:p>
Sometimes it's (again seems random) like this (expected result, makes sense after all):
<text:p text:style-name="P7">There is my text.</text:p>
Is there any way to get rid superfluous xml tags? Or at least can user see a raw document in LibreOffice/OpenOffice to manually remove redundancy?
The key is to provide easy tool for a user, to detect and fix artefacts like this.
Have you tried Ctrl-M? If all formatting is defined in styles and style formatting is not manually overridden, it should not disturb the formatting but should remove redundant tags.
A tedious user process would be to cut and paste-special as text and apply style again.
Finally, a macro would definitely do the trick.

How to prevent LaTeX from hyphenating words containing a dash?

I would like to globally prevent LaTeX from hyphenating 'Objective-C'. I am aware of the \hyphenation command, but I don't see how I can make use of it. If I pass 'Objective-C' to this command, the dash will be treated as a hint to hyphenate the word there.
One solution I found is wrapping Objective-C into an mbox each time I use it. However, the document I am writing contains this name a lot, and wrapping it into an mbox each time is ugly (as is defining a command and using this over and over again in the source code).
Why is defining a new command ugly? It's how \LaTeX\ defines itself.
\def\ObjectiveC{\mbox{Objective-C}}
Use \nobreakdash. That's what LyX produces when I insert a nonbreakingdash and convert it to tex.
As suggested here, you could define a command like this:
\newcommand\dash{\nobreakdash-\hspace{0pt}}
and use it like this
Consider the $n$\dash dimensional manifold ...
Also, you could use the babel package and use "~ as a protected hyphen. I'm not sure if using babel is advisable when writing in english, though.

How do I disable colors in LaTeX output generated from sphinx?

When I build the LaTeX file generated from sphinx, the TOC entries, and section headers are blue. Is there an easy way to disable coloring these items? If not, is there an easy way to make them black instead? My goal is to print the document on a non-color printer, and the TOC and headings do not look as dark as the rest of the text when I do so.
I would like to make one change that applies to the whole document if possible.
Note: I am using the howto document class.
Update
Thanks to ddbeck's input, I took a closer look at sphinx.sty which defines the colors that I needed to change. I set (created) the latex_elements dictionary in conf.py as follows:
mypreamble ='''
\\pagenumbering{arabic}
\\definecolor{TitleColor}{rgb}{0,0,0}
\\definecolor{InnerLinkColor}{rgb}{0,0,0}
'''
latex_elements = {
'papersize':'letterpaper',
'pointsize':'11pt',
'preamble':mypreamble
}
This worked out exactly as I wanted it. Thanks ddbeck!
You can add LaTeX by using the latex_elements['preamble'] configuration option. If you change the value of that key, you can override Sphinx's normal LaTeX. The docs on this option aren't particularly illuminating, however. You may find this thread from sphinx-dev a bit more helpful; it has more detail on how that might be used, as well as some good links for learning about LaTex (if that's something you need to get black and white output). Finally, it might help to take a look at the default .cls and .sty files.

Adding MS-Word-like comments in LaTeX

I need a way to add text comments in "Word style" to a Latex document. I don't mean to comment the source code of the document. What I want is a way to add corrections, suggestions, etc. to the document, so that they don't interrupt the text flow, but that would still make it easy for everyone to know, which part of the sentence they are related to. They should also "disappear" when compiling the document for printing.
At first, I thought about writing a new command, that would just forward the input to \marginpar{}, and when compiling for printing would just make the definition empty. The problem is you have no guarantee where the comments will appear and you will not be able to distinguish them from the other marginpars.
Any idea?
todonotes is another package that makes nice looking callouts. You can see a number of examples in the documentation.
Since LaTeX is a text format, if you want to show someone the differences in a way that they can use them (and cherry pick from them) use the standard diff tool (e.g., diff -u orig.tex new.tex > docdiffs). This is the best way to annotate something like LaTeX documents, and can be easily used by anyone involved in the production of a document from LaTeX sources. You can then use standard LaTeX comments in your patch to explain the changes, and they can be very easily integrated. If the document lives in a version control system of some sort, just use the VCS to generate a patch file that can be reviewed.
I have used changes.sty, which gives basic change colouring:
\added{new text}
\deleted{old text}
\replaced{new text}{old text}
All of these take an optional parameter with the initials of the author who did this change. This results in different colours used, and these initials are displayed superscripted after the changed text.
\replaced[MI]{new text}{old text}
You can hide the change marks by giving the option final to the changes package.
This is very basic, and comments are not supported, but it might help.
My little home-rolled "fixme" tool uses \marginpar where possible and goes inline in places (like captions) where that is hard to arrange. This works out because I don't often use margin paragraphs for other things. This does mean you can't finalize the layout until everything is fixed, but I don't feel much pain from that...
Other than that I heartily agree with Michael about using standard tools and version control.
See also:
Tips for collaboratively editing a LaTeX document (which addresses you main question...)
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/193298/best-practices-in-latex
and a self-plug:
How do I get Emacs to fill sentences, but not paragraphs?
You could also try the trackchanges package.
You can use the changebar package to highlight areas of text that have been affected.
If you don't want to do the markup manually (which can be tedious and interrupt the flow of editing) the neat latexdiff utility will take a diff of your document and produce a version of it with markup added to visually display the changes between the two versions in the typeset output.
This would be my preferred solution, although I haven't tested it out on large, multi-file documents.
The best package I know is Easy Review that provides the commenting functionality into LaTeX environment. For example, you can use the following simple commands such as \add{NEW TEXT}, \remove{OLD TEXT}, \replace{OLD TEXT}{NEW TEXT}, \comment{TEXT}{COMMENT}, \highlight{TEXT}, and \alert{TEXT}.
Some examples can be found here.
The todonotes package looks great, but if that proves too cumbersome to use, a simple solution is just to use footnotes (e.g. in red to separate them from regular footnotes).
Package trackchanges.sty works exactly the way changes.sty. See #Svante's reply.
It has easy to remember commands and you can change how edits will appear after compiling the document. You can also hide the edits for printing.

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