Using Linux text editor to prepare content for Microsoft Word

editorstext processing

I need to prepare a long manuscript that must be submitted in a Microsoft Word document in order to meet the submission criteria. (Please no "Don't use Word" comments.)

I want to use a text editor on my Linux computer (Ubuntu). I will eventually paste the content into a Word document when it is finished. I don't have access to Word just now and I cannot test this.

I will probably use a mixture of different text editors as is usual.

Is there anything I need to watch out for, such as line endings and text encoding, so that I don't need to rework the text when I paste it into the new format and OS?

Best Answer

Install pandoc, then select any of the markup formats it supports as input. Write your manuscript in that format, then convert to .docx.

I'd suggest using:

Markdown if you don't need much in the way of formatting. The occasional italicized word, maybe a headline, some bullets. This site uses a variant of Markdown for posts, so you already know it.
DocBook if you need a highly-structured document. It is suited to creation of book-sized documents, particularly the sort that don't need fancy formatting, but which have deep structure. (i.e. Most nonfiction.)
LaTeX if you happen to know the markup language already.

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Text editor for printing C++ code

Well, if you want to go the extra mile, do it in LaTeX and provide a professional level PDF file. You haven't mentioned your distribution so I'll give instructions for Debian based systems. The same basic idea can be done on any Linux though.

Install a LaTeX system and necessary packages

sudo apt-get install texlive-latex-extra latex-xcolor texlive-latex-recommended

Create a new file (call it report.tex) with the following contents:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{fancyhdr}
\pagestyle{fancy}
%% Define your header here. 
%% See http://texblog.org/2007/11/07/headerfooter-in-latex-with-fancyhdr/
\fancyhead[CO,CE]{John Doe, Class 123}

\usepackage[usenames,dvipsnames]{color}  %% Allow color names

%% The listings package will format your source code
\usepackage{listings}
\lstdefinestyle{customasm}{
  belowcaptionskip=1\baselineskip,
  xleftmargin=\parindent,
  language=C++,
  breaklines=true, %% Wrap long lines
  basicstyle=\footnotesize\ttfamily,
  commentstyle=\itshape\color{Gray},
  stringstyle=\color{Black},
  keywordstyle=\bfseries\color{OliveGreen},
  identifierstyle=\color{blue},
  xleftmargin=-8em,
  showstringspaces=false
}        
\begin{document}

\lstinputlisting[style=customasm]{/path/to/your/code.c}

\end{document}

Just make sure to change /path/to/your/code.c in the penultimate line so that it point to the actual path of your C file. If you have more than one file to include, add a \newpage and then a new \lstinputlisting for the other file.

Compile a PDF (this creates report.pdf)
```
pdflatex report.tex    
```

I tested this on my system with an example file I found here and it creates a PDF that looks like this:

For a more comprehensive example that will automatically find all .c files in the target folder and create an indexed PDF file with each in a separate section, see my answer here.

Default Text Editor – Command for Default In-Terminal Text Editor

You can use $EDITOR, provided that it's been defined:

$EDITOR filename.txt

But I think most docs use nano because if someone's blindly following along, it's a safe bet to use. If the user has decided they actually prefer one editor over another, they'll know enough to replace it with vim, emacs, etc themselves.

edit may work well on Debian-based systems, but on others it invokes ex, which isn't recommended.

Best Answer

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Text editor for printing C++ code

Default Text Editor – Command for Default In-Terminal Text Editor

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