Following the ECCS conference (http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX).

This is a way of creating a document with the instructions for precise layout and formats placed in the document with ‘commands’ such as \section{“something”} to start a new section entitled “something”. It’s less like writing in a WYSIWYG and more like coding, you have to run a program on your text to convert your document with its embedded instructions into a real document such as a PDF. Edit, compile, check PDF, re-edit… AGGH. It reminds me of word processors pre-WYSIWYG era where you had to insert special characters to do things like bold text. Very powerful but arcane to say the least. Though to be fair, it’s not that unusual a process. HTML such as this web page does exactly the same - the words are surrounded by invisible markup to specify how the content should be displayed. I think my real problem is that since it isn’t a system to write in, I much prefer to do that in a word processor such as OpenOffice, I have to first write in OpenOffice then move it to LateX and start editing again. Messy and therefore ripe for a technical solution.

The OpenOffice extension Writer2LaTeX offers some hope allowing you to export your OpenOffice document directly to LaTeX but it seems it will need a lot of configuring to get a desired output. In the end it was quicker to simply cut’n’paste. Still, in theory it looks possible to use the LateX style and class file provided by Springer and convert them into an OpenOffice template so that the styles match. I think the configuration of Writer2LateX could also be done automatically. If that’s possible I would then be able to take the style files provided by a publisher and convert them allowing me to write in OpenOffice with the styles required by the publisher, then export with Writer2LateX and not have to edit the output at all. It can all be done in OpenOffice. Umm, yet another programming project…. Until then it’s time consuming cut’n’paste.