As you all know, I’m a huge fan of Org mode and use it for virtually all the writing I do. One of the powers of Org is that you can export it to many different formats. One of those formats is the Borg Word. I always make some facile statement like, “and you can export to Docx if you need to produce a Word document.” But, of course, the reality is a bit different.
Chris Maiorana is a writer and has to acquiesce to the demands of his publisher. Sadly, that most often means submitting your manuscript in Word. It makes perfect sense for the publisher. They can have a single file for the entire production pipeline. They don’t have to deal with paper, can easily track editorial suggestions and the author’s reaction to them, and when everybody is happy, they can send it to the printer.
To those with any sense of aesthetics or writing efficiency, it makes no sense at all. Word is a horror and makes me want to stick a pencil in my eye every time I have to use it. Fortunately, there’s an escape hatch. You can write in Org mode and leverage the power of Emacs and then export it to Word when you’re done.
Of course, the actual process can be a little more complicated. Maiorana has an excellent post on how to actually handle the process. The first, probably most important, issue is dealing with different Word formats that the various publishers require. Maiorana shows how to deal with that and to pick the appropriate publisher format template at export time.
Take a look at Maiorana’s post for the details. He also has an interesting clip of a chat between Lex Fridman and Neal Stephenson talking about Emacs. Stephenson talks about publishers “putting their foot down” and requiring Word. He talks a bit about how he deals with that. I’m not sure when the talk took place but at the time Stephenson wasn’t using Org. That’s too bad because it would have solved a lot of his problems. I’m sure he’s probably discovered it by now.