If you’re like me, you’d rather take a pencil in the eye than write using Word or any of its evil spawn. Sometimes, though, you really need to deliver a doc file. Even in a lead engineer position I sometimes had to produce documents for management that they would tweak and send to, say, their lawyers. Needless to say, management wasn’t interested in an Org file, whatever the hell that is.
So. A conundrum. On the one hand a cranky engineer who didn’t want to fire up Word, and on the other, suits who didn’t know there was any way to produce documents besides Word. What to do? Not all that long ago the choices were
- Cranky engineer bites to bullet and fires up Word
- The bosses’ secretary takes an ASCII document and imports it into Word
Neither was very satisfactory so we’re lucky that today’s Org mode has a better answer. Since Org 7.8, you can export an Org document to odt format and from there to doc format.
Bin Chen explains how to automate the process of converting an Org document to a Word document in doc format. It’s a pretty simple process involving specifying what you want the end format to be and what tool (LibreOffice by default) should be used to convert from odt to the final format.
If you occasionally have to produce documents in doc format, you should definitely take a look at Chen’s post. Tomorrow, we’ll revisit this subject from the point of view of a fiction writer that has to deliver drafts in doc format but much prefers working in Emacs.