I am often forced to tolerate, work with, and worse, be polite to a crowd of administrators, bureaucrats, committee chairs etc whose idea of a good spread-sheet program is xl-sheets (and recently google docs and other monstrosities from that company whose UI has the fine qualities of Vogon poetry). Time to time they demand all kinds of data from you in certain god given formats. Some of the characteristics of these formats.
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A multitude of tables with multi-colum spanning cells. Administrators love tables for multiple reasons. Firstly, they are ugly. An otherwise well typeset document can be ruined by placing tables strategically. Secondly, they have the appearance of perfect objectivity when there is none -- Who would not trust the brute force of numbers when arranged like the skyline of South Mumbai.
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Arbitrarily numbered lists -- 3.2, 4.i and 42.a in the same enumerate list (bullet list and description list have not yet been invented). The only point of this scheme of numbering is to frustrate the average TeX users (to hell with your
\begin{enumerate}) so much that they might start thinking about bloatwares like libreoffice or god forbid even the office suites of Microsoft. -
And finally to kill whatever aesthetics is left, all kinds of interplay of bold and italics fonts.
The net result of all the above is a document that can be exhibited in the next Modern-Art festival with not even the shrewdest critic suspecting any foul play.
This repository collects .org files that I use to deal with some of
these unreasonable demands. These are in no way idiomatic and are
merely hacks that I use to get things done. Needless to say they are
not worth emulating. Also they do not try to match every typesetting
fantasy that has ever been dreamt up by these folks, but merely
handles the most obvious things that they look for -- namely tables
and numbering (no other means of cross referencing exists in the 21st
century). The saving grace is that, an average office suite (some
times rather perversely called productivity suites) user attributes
slight variations in typesetting to version mismatch in softwares ---
wrong version of office suites is a perfectly legitimate argument in
this world. Hence say a LaTeX's font selection is often forgiven -- at
least it works. However, be warned that nothing is guaranteed. They
might evolve, and in the near future, might acquire the ability to
perceive colours and then one might need to handle multi-coloured
text.
A note to prospective users of this code/files. You are dealing with a formidable enemy here, do not be under any illusion that you can have your revenge. This is your basic survival kit and if you are lucky, you may just scrape through. The colourful name for this repository is just my false sense of bravado.
I hereby place the contents of this entire repository in public domain. For details see the accompanying UNLICENSE.txt.