Re: [libreoffice-marketing] LibO in Academia

On 10/17/2010 05:28 AM, Marc Paré wrote:
> This thread is to explore the LibO use in Academia and tools necessary
> to make it more appealing.
>
> Marc

Here are a few things that would make LibO appealing to academia:

1. Export to LaTeX*. Support for LaTeX in OOo was limited to the 
OOoLaTeX extension, which allows one to interface to a TeX engine by 
typing an equation in LaTeX-style, calling the TeX engine, and inserting 
a PNG of the typeset result into the OOo document.  It would be really 
great if there were a "save as" option to save an OOo document in LaTeX 
-- then LibO could become like "LyX," a GUI for LaTeX, but better. 
Academic departments sometimes insist on LaTeX thesis submissions, so 
this could provide a real boost in LibO usage.

Import from LaTeX would also be nice, but not likely to be easy for 
anything beyond basic capabilities,  there are thousands of LaTeX 
packages, and supporting all of that infrastructure is hard. 
Incidentally, LaTeX export/import functionality is offered as a 
commercial plugin to MSO, with the Word2TeX and TeX2Word commercial 
plugin, and the export quality is much better than the import.

2.  Native support for the BibTeX reference organizer.

3.  Good and varied templates for resumes, CVs.  Perhaps these are 
already available?

* LaTeX is a powerful typesetting system often used for technical fields 
in academia.  For mathematical expressions, the quality cannot be beat, 
and even for text, the kerning and text flow is quite sophisticated 
(see, e.g., http://nitens.org/taraborelli/latex).

     ----Jon

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