Originally published on eve.gd on 19 October 2012, last updated 6 September 2026.
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In my quest to create a set of free and open tools for platinum, scholar-run OA journals, I've just committed a crude, provisional script to my meXml git repository that assists with typesetting into pseudo-NLM format.
just committed
meXml git repository
A few notes. First of all, what does it do? The script parses markup output from the wysihtml5 tool and converts it into near-as-damnit the format I need for typesetting. The idea is that I paste a LibreOffice document (with endnotes, not footnotes) into the tool, and grab the markup it returns. This python script then parses it one step further into the format that I need to generate galleys for Orbit with the /tools/gengalleys.sh tool. I still have to clean up the markup, but this has reduced the time it takes to typeset down from about 6-8 hours to about 2 hours.
wysihtml5 tool
/tools/gengalleys.sh
Is this the best way to do it? Almost certainly not. Why? Because the way to do it properly would be to create a set of LibreOffice styles (or whatever mechanism it uses) and then get their tool to directly output in the format that's needed. It's also the case that I have broken compatibility with NLM standards (at present) in my implementation. This is something that I aim to gradually fix; I needed to break it at the time to Just Get It Done (trademark).
Is the script complete? Nope. It's pretty sloppy coding, too. Again, this is a dirty hack that I've committed in case it helps somebody.
Disclaimers done: enjoy!
This reference list has been generated, in many cases, through an automated process and may therefore contain errors or incomplete metadata. It is provided purely as assistance for finding the items mentioned within this post.
1. ‘A plugin for Open Journal Systems to generate PDF galleys from XML’, GitHub <https://github.com/MartinPaulEve/MEXMLGalley>
2. ‘Add crude python script to assist with typesetting’, GitHub <https://github.com/MartinPaulEve/MEXMLGalley/commit/351a8e28fc0adc5a1e3554b716f9bce78157620f>
https://github.com/MartinPaulEve/MEXMLGalley
https://github.com/MartinPaulEve/MEXMLGalley/commit/351a8e28fc0adc5a1e3554b716f9bce78157620f