We are using PubPub to collaborate on essays that will then be part of a print book with MIT Press. Can I encourage folks to use PubPub for collaboration? Can PubPub export Word files usable by eXtyles, for print production? (I suspect not.)
We’re not familiar with eXtyles – can you let us know more about how you use it in your workflow?
That said, PubPub does export to standard MS Word docs. Looking briefly at the eXtyles site, I don’t see any reason why you couldn’t use them with eXtyles. Our support for Word isn’t perfect at the moment, but we are working on improving it. So if you’d be willing to give an exported Word doc a try in eXtyles and let us know what works and what doesn’t, it would help us improve our exporting capability.
I know very little about eXtyles myself. I just know that as an author with MIT Press, that’s where my doc files go, and that it can be brittle. I don’t know what the relationship between MITP and KF and PubPub is, but if MITP plans on using PubPub as a platform, someone needs to have this conversation. Otherwise, I can’t encourage folks to use PubPub for collaborative revision.
MITP is one of the founding organizations of the KFG. We work closely with both the book and journal teams and have successfully used PubPub for several collaborative book projects that are making their way to print. So far we haven’t encountered issues with eXtyles that have blocked any projects. But of course we can always improve, so we’ll make sure to reach out to the books production team to have a conversation about compatibility.
Did they actually use the export of the PubPub as the input into eXtyles? I’m most concerned about the foot- and end-notes.
MIT Press may have moved on from eXtyles, but have a look at what a citation in PubPub is rendered as in the docx export.
It breaks the paragraph.
Thanks. Yeah, we’re aware this is happening for a few other MITP projects. I’m looking into a quick fix for now – and we’re planning to put a lot of effort into importing and exporting over the summer.
I personally write everything in markdown and convert via pandoc. I’m not sure what you are using for conversion, but if you aren’t familiar with pandoc, you might have a look at some of the formatters there.
At the other end, when converted to PubPub, my last two books had some issues with blockquotes that needed to be fixed. So an impressive test is if you can roundtrip Scribe-friendly Word → PubPub → Word in an idempotent way. 
Can you provide a link to a Pub that had a blockquote issue?
We use Pandoc for both importing and exporting, and I’ve just spent the last 48 hours working on filters for footnotes and citations. Good news there is it seems to work pretty well, so expect some improvements in the next few weeks. But I think it’s going to be nearly impossible to do an idempotent round-trip because of the way Pandoc handles inline vs. block elements under the hood. But we can certainly get closer.
I don’t know about the specifics on the book->PubPub issue with blockquotes, but Catherine Ahearn might.