@shauna Hmm, I'm not sure if this would suit your use case but I usually author stuff in markdown and then use stuff like pandoc to convert to html or pdf for others to view.

For full control this might be a good opportunity to learn some LaTeX since it should give you those levers.

It's defs harder to get into than a graphical editor if you're not already preferring text-mode.

@shauna In general the visual "what you see is what you get" tools will get slower as your data grows due to all the extra stuff it needs to do for layout. 😅

@mauve @shauna LyX is kind of a gui editor for LaTeX

But yeah, LaTeX has a bit of a learning curve but I've been using it for decades.

@mauve @shauna you can use pandoc to turn a word doc into one big markdown file or per chapter markdown files then concat and turn back into a document

how was this doc made in the fist place?

@glassresistor @mauve Yes! I am using pandoc in the flow I settled upon, it is definitely the most common suggestion from the crowd. :)

The original file is an export from Roam Research, and is kind of weird (Roam has a slightly different markdown flavor, and everything is bulleted) but I was able to make the edits I needed in a code editor that could handle the size easily, before converting with pandoc to odt for final formatting tweaks

@glassresistor @mauve @shauna Yeah, this is the approach we ended up using for LFE (Lisp Flavoured Erlang) documentation. I quite liked it :-)

@shauna Oh! Also if you settle on an alternative I would love to hear it. Defs relevant to my needs as well.

@mauve I hacked together something that works ok:

- make all substantive edits in markdown in VSCode, which handles 126k words flawlessly
- then convert via pandoc to odt
- open in LibreOffice to do the last bits of formatting. (LibreOffice handles formatting fine, it was just choking on things like find and replace.)

As long as I'm not doing too many last minute "oh shoot I forgot" edits this should be...bearable.

@shauna life finds a way! 😁 Nice to see VSCode is handling large files well. I remember that was a major reason I switched from it back in the day. Ty for sharing your flow.

@shauna @mauve that is how I've done all my books, except in emacs not VSCode. Pandoc FTW.

Recently I got edits for a book in docx, with a volume of track changes that LibreOffice and Google Docs couldn't handle. Turned out online Word was the only thing that worked.

@shauna @mauve Oh, there's also WriteMonkey: https://writemonkey.com/wm3/ – seems to be aimed specifically at writers.