I’ve been on a story writing kick for about a year now. Actually, one of my goals this year was to write at least one short story per month.
Aside: so far I’m doing pretty good, I wrote four stories in January and another in March. I’m also working on a serial web fiction!
Anyway, one of the things that I think a lot of writers will need to deal with at some point is editor revisions. Not that this is a bad thing, I’m very thankful for the awesome folks at Nat1 Publishing for giving me feedback. Their edits always make my writing better and I’m learning a lot.
Now that I’ve stated the obvious, I have one workflow gripe. That is they require Word documents (.docx) for submissions. Now I write everything in vim, format it with Markdown, track it with git, and that’s that. Plain text all the way. When someone wants a Word doc or a PDF, I just Pandoc it away into the format they want and ship it off.
Normally this is plenty fine, everybody is happy. But when I get edits back, almost always the changes are tracked in Word’s change tracker. The LibreOffice Write equivalent would be the Compare Document feature.
So for a few stories now I’ve gone through the process of opening up LibreOffice, comparing documents, and then stepping through the changes one at a time, accepting or rejecting what was there. Sometimes I make edits which combine the two changes. It’s a bit cumbersome because Write’s keyboard shortcuts aren’t that great for this feature. I also don’t have Word on my swanky new Commodore OS Vision, so the clicking continued.
Until I realized I’m basically using LibreOffice as a merge tool. That gave me the idea that I really don’t need to use Write at all, I just need another translation layer.
What I did was convert the .docx I got back from the editors into markdown with Pandoc. Pandoc is really good at handling things like em dashes with its own flavor of Markdown, so this wouldn’t be a problem.
pandoc -o stardust_edited.md stardust_edited.docxThen I made a copy of my original story and called it “final.” Now I could use both files in vimdiff to track my changes.
vimdiff -o stardust_edited.md stardust_final.md
This might surprise strangers to vimdiff, but all of the same tools I was using in Write were already available. Only now they were better for a couple of reasons.
First, vimdiff supports a two-pane view with the editors’ copy on top and my original (now final) copy on the bottom. Blocks of text with modifications are highlighted magenta, while the actual changed characters are highlighted red. This makes it really clear what’s mine, what’s theirs, and what the final result (un-highlighted) will look like.
Second, and most importantly, I get to use vim’s diff mode
keybindings. ]c jumps to the next change while
[c jumps back a change. dp will push the
currently highlighted change into my final copy, while do
will reject it, or place my original change into the editors’ copy.
This let me move through the document much faster with tools I’m way more comfortable with. When I was finished, I just used Pandoc to turn the final draft back into a .docx and sent it to the editors. I gave it a final read just to make sure I didn’t miss anything in the conversion, but there wasn’t anything really special about the formatting.
And there you have it, easy vimdiff change tracking for when people send you Word documents. About the only thing this doesn’t get me is comments, and for that LibreOffice hangs around on my install. Maybe there’s a way to extract the comments and associate them with lines in the resulting text. There are some projects, like this one which are designed to extract comments as a Pandoc plugin. I’m sure it could be worked into this solution, maybe with a nice script to tie it all together. But that’s for another time.