If you work with tex4ht to convert LaTeX to OpenDocument (for subsequent Word conversion in NeoOffice, say), you may find yourself wanting to doctor an .odt file. At least I did; sometimes tex4ht outputs an odt with problems or syntax errors. But here’s the nice thing, if you need some quick odt first aid: as I learned from this article by Maarten Wisse, an odt is really just a zip archive.

> unzip test.odt
Archive:  test.odt
   creating: META-INF/
  inflating: META-INF/manifest.xml
   creating: Pictures/
  inflating: content.xml
  inflating: meta.xml
  inflating: settings.xml
  inflating: styles.xml

Mirabile dictu, those xml files are pretty easy to read. All the good stuff is in content.xml and styles.xml. You can burrow into these files wth a text editor, modifying style parameters or the way tex4ht has tried to tag your content. And when you’re done:

> zip test.odt content.xml
updating: content.xml (deflated 81%)

That’s all! If NeoOffice gives you an error when it tries to open a generated odt, it will tell you the line number of the syntax problem, and you can just fix it by hand.

All right, I know, kludge city. But very, very useful in a pinch.

I made some updates to my LaTeX page. Then I realized I had so many notes on the subject that I decided to start a little side blog on the subject of TeX and digital document preparation in the humanities. I’ll add entries there occasionally as I make discoveries and encounter problems of a technological kind.

Update, November 2012. I have migrated the posts from this blog onto this site. You can view them in the page of all blog posts tagged “tex”.

Here’s a first tip for humanist TeXheads.

A PDF file can be more than just an image.

If you’ve copied text and pasted it from a PDF (or opened a JSTOR scan and discovered you couldn’t), then you know that a PDF is not just a picture for printing but a hypertext in its own right. If you use modern TeX at all, you know that pdflatex and xelatex produce well-behaved PDFs that can indeed be copied from. (In the old days, when you had to use a tex to dvi to postscript to pdf workflow, things were not so reliable.)

The grand challenge for TeX loyalists in the humanities is clear: TeX/Word interoperation.

It’s been a long day of debugging, and I’m still not all the way there. But I’ll be using this space soon to post some results on using the tex4ht suite to generate an OpenDocument file (which can then be converted by NeoOffice to Word format). It can be done, even with a 200 pp book manuscript with hundreds of autogenerated footnotes and lots of Unicode text. The current maintainers of tex4ht have done amazing work on keeping it functioning in tandem with cutting-edge packages. There are lots of issues, and hopefully they’ll be making some serious updates soon, but still.

Anyway, more to come here on this subject. TeX to Word is within reach.

Why blog about the LaTeX typesetting system and literary studies?

Over on Arcade I wrote an introduction to a Colloquy on Autonomy: we’ve collected a long series of posts connected to problems of literary, cultural, and other kinds of autonomy. Comments are welcome on the Colloquy page, and keep an eye out for new entries in the series!

[Sub-sub-editor’s note, June 13, 2016: it appears that in the renovated Arcade, the new colloquies section does not provide access to pre-renovation colloquies. The Internet Archive took a snapshot of the page in February 2012. My introduction to the colloquy is still accessible on Arcade.]

[Sub-sub-sub-editor’s note, July 27, 2026: my introduction disappeared too, so I added the text here, and struck out the invitation to comment. Links lead to the Wayback Archive versions of pages.]

This website has moved to http://andrewgoldstone.com (and is now hosted in the cloud!). Please update your bookmarks accordingly.

My double review of two provocative modernist studies books is now out in Studies in the Novel 43, no. 2. I discuss Elizabeth Outka’s Consuming Traditions and Enda Duffy’s The Speed Handbook. Reading the two together gave me a chance to reflect on what you might call the Standard Model of modernist studies. Lots of good work happens within the Model, but is it time for a new paradigm?

Update, July 2026: This was a post on Arcade, which has, oddly enough, been cited by more than one serious work on close reading. My post is still there, though moved to a new server, at shc.stanford.edu/arcade/interventions/close-reading-genre. I’ve updated this page to include my text for reference, with one broken link fixed.

I have recently been seething with irritation at a certain scholarly book. Tempting as it would be to use the internet for its natural purpose and gripe about that book in detail, I am instead going to channel my energies into something with a little more intellectual value. The source of my irritation, you see, is that this book exaggerates to a fault—an incredibly irritating fault—all the virtues of “good” close reading. But what do I mean by that, my rational self asks my (normally dominant) griping self? Hmm. Fair question, rational self.