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Comment by ucaetano | Hacker News Reader

I believe that Google Docs actually handles all of those.

How would Google Docs update a graph in a document from an external graphics file?

All my graphs and tables are generated in some programming environment, and updated frequently. In Word, I would have to right-click every single graph, select new source file, adapt graph size... Could Google Docs do this?

Make it a link to the file in Word instead of embedding it. Then it auto-updates in the document as well.

Don't know about external files, but it can update charts from sheets, and you can also write a script that does it automatically, both on word and gdocs.

It does, but it has a lot of the same problems as MS Office, some worse. The scripting/macro system is arcane, proprietary, and only works in the cloud. The files aren't in an easily parseable format. You can export them to OOXML/ODF, but then you're stuck with parsing some ridiculously complex markup. As far as I know the version history is not exportable either.

Also, once I wanted to write some light math equations in a google doc and went hunting for plugins that provide just a bit of TeX-like math functionality. I did find something called "Auto LaTeX Equations", but it didn't really work all that well. It did let me typeset equations, but they came out very pixellated for some reason. I also found "gMath", but couldn't persuade it to render any equations.

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