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Written while listening to “Wait” by The Beatles.
Published: 2021-02-10
Tagged with:
I just recalled how cool macros are. I was helping to convert a manuscript for a book from LibreOffice to LaTeX, and to speed the conversion we used pandoc. The problem was that pandoc added a lot of noise to the generated code. Take for instance this bit:
\hypertarget{foo-bar-baz}{%
\subsubsection[foo bar baz]{\texorpdfstring{\protect\hypertarget{anchor-92}{}{}Foo Bar Baz}{Foo Bar Baz}}\label{foo-bar-baz}}
that needs to be converted to like
\section{Foo Bar Baz}
i.e. subsection → section and remove some crufts. If there were only a handful of those, I could have done it by hand, but given that were around 700 instance of those, it was unfeasible.
My first idea was to fire up sam and play with it a bit. Unfortunately, it’s been a while since I’ve used it extensively, so I’m a bit rusty. The plan was to use the command x to select every paragraph, then g to filter that type of paragraphs and then something with s, but I failed.
Given that I didn’t want to spend too much time on this, I tried to use an Emacs macro. Oh boy, it went so well.
The macro goes along the lines of
C-s ;; isearch-forward \ ;; self-insert-command section ;; self-insert-command * 7 RET ;; newline C-a ;; move-beginning-of-line 2*C-M-SPC ;; mark-sexp C-w ;; kill-region C-p ;; previous-line 2*C-o ;; open-line C-y ;; yank C-n ;; next-line M-h ;; mark-paragraph C-w ;; kill-region
it goes to the next \section, select the LaTeX command and the text within the square brackets (using mark-sexp two times), move that bit before and then killing the paragraph.
Then ‘C-- C-x e’ and the whole file was fixed.
The bottom line is, I guess, use your editor and learn it, or something along those lines.
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