Ok, I will definitely try this, I totally understand if you have other things.
I am working on a workflow that uses the markup-plugin to generate a JATS XML from docx. It works fairly well. It sends the docx from OJS to Open Typesetting Stack and OTS sends a XML file back. I also made a small plugin that generates the front part of the file and shows it on the article metadata page. You can easily copy/paste it from there to the XML file. The Open Typesetting Stack is already adding some of the OJS metadata there, but at the moment it is very limited compared to the amount of data available. Probably this will be enhanced and my plugin is not needed anymore.
The biggest challenge there are of course references, but while testing this with five of our journals some of the articles returned had promising results. So next week I will try to figure out the “holy grail” of marking references in the docx end.
I also got an answer from Alec regarding the artwork with xml files Artwork files for XML galleys - #2 by asmecher
This would probably help your workflow as well?
I will probably try to add the rewriting of artwork url’s like with the html files. I was also thinking whether it would be good idea to try to write the publication date (and also issue data if not yet available) to the JATS XML file when the issue is published. There should be a hook there when publishing an issue which should be easy to use with a plugin. I think that this is something PKP might not want into the core.
What remains a problem is pdf. I tried to print a few of the CaSSius examples I found and although they usually look good on the screen, the printed version has many problems. One of our journals (with an editor with excellent technical skills) is doing XML by first converting to Markdown (with Pandoc) and from Markdown to JATS XML. They have really nice pdf’s by converting from Markdown to PDF. But the tools they are using a mostly command line tools and the workflow I am trying to work out should be something that a normal journal editor could handle. Command line tools is not really among the options.