I am often forced to tolerate, work with, and worse, be polite to acrowd of administrators, bureaucrats, committee chairs etc whose ideaof a good spread-sheet program is xl-sheets (and recently google docsand other monstrosities from that company whose UI has the finequalities of Vogon poetry). Time to time they demand all kinds of datafrom you in certain god given formats. Some of the characteristics ofthese formats.
A multitude of tables with multi-colum spanningcells. Administrators love tables for multiple reasons. Firstly,they are ugly. An otherwise well typeset document can be ruined byplacing tables strategically. Secondly, they have the appearance ofperfect objectivity when there is none -- Who would not trust thebrute force of numbers when arranged like the skyline of SouthMumbai.
Arbitrarily numbered lists -- 3.2, 4.i and 42.a in the sameenumerate list (bullet list and description list have not yet beeninvented). The only point of this scheme of numbering is tofrustrate the average TeX users (to hell with your\begin{enumerate}) so much that they might start thinking aboutbloatwares like libreoffice or god forbid even the office suites ofMicrosoft.
And finally to kill whatever aesthetics is left, all kinds ofinterplay of bold and italics fonts.
The net result of all the above is a document that can be exhibited inthe next Modern-Art festival with not even the shrewdest criticsuspecting any foul play.
This repository collects.org files that I use to deal with some ofthese unreasonable demands. These are in no wayidiomatic and aremerely hacks that I use to get things done. Needless to say they arenot worth emulating. Also they do not try to match every typesettingfantasy that has ever been dreamt up by these folks, but merelyhandles the most obvious things that they look for -- namely tablesand numbering (no other means of cross referencing exists in the 21stcentury). The saving grace is that, an average office suite (sometimes rather perversely called productivity suites) user attributesslight variations in typesetting to version mismatch in softwares ---wrong version of office suites is a perfectly legitimate argument inthis world. Hence say a LaTeX's font selection is often forgiven -- atleast it works. However, be warned that nothing is guaranteed. Theymight evolve, and in the near future, might acquire the ability toperceive colours and then one might need to handle multi-colouredtext.
A note to prospective users of this code/files. You are dealing with aformidable enemy here, do not be under any illusion that you can haveyour revenge. This is your basic survival kit and if you are lucky,you may just scrape through. The colourful name for this repository isjust my false sense of bravado.
I hereby place the contents of this entire repository in publicdomain. For details see the accompanying UNLICENSE.txt.