Re: Book writing mode?

[Luis O. Silva]

Hi,

On Fri, 28 May 2004 00:05:30 -0500, Joe Corneli writes:

   Joe> Maybe you can bring this difficulty up with the
   Joe> publisher.  If the publisher can supply an appropriate
   Joe> LaTeX .sty file, it will save future authors the
   Joe> formatting hassle.

I agree. LaTeX is the best option for both the writer and the
publisher. Moreover, it is difficult for me to imagine how I
could write a serious text, even when it is not so large,
without RefTeX.

Nevertheless, I've found myself, more than once, in the case
when I need just plain text; for example when your work will
be read in an e-mail and there is no way of displaying a pdf
or a dvi file. This is the case when you need just a well
formatted easy-to-read text file. Well, even in these cases, I
prefer to use LaTeX and later recur to pdftotext. This formula
works almost perfectly. The only problem may occur when you
don't write in English, as is usually the case for me :-(
Acknowledging that this is out of theme, I would appreciate
some hint of other applications for converting dvi or pdf
files to text files and that could handle different encodings.

Thanks,
luis