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Converting TeX to Microsoft Word? 89

Posted by Cliff from the document-format-wranglin' dept.
belmolis asks: "For many years I've done almost all of my writing in TeX. This has increasingly caused problems with publishing in journals. For a long time, many journals reset what you sent them, so they didn't care what program you used. More and more, I find, they do, and in most cases, what they want is MS Word. Is there any good way to convert TeX to Word?"
"I've seen some advertised. Some only work with LaTeX, which doesn't help. One claims to use a full-scale TeX interpreter, but my queries as to whether it can handle home-brew Metafont fonts, PIC graphics etc. have gone unanswered. These products also all seem to be plugins for MS Word. I don't use MS Windows or any other MS products, and hate WYSIWYG word processors (I hated Bravo before it was reincarnated as Word) so a Word plugin is not a great solution, even if it works.

Furthermore, I wonder what exactly these programs do. If they interpret the TeX and then generate very low level Word, that may result in a document that looks similar, but a journal editor probably won't be able to edit it the way he wants to. In some cases the editor can be persuaded to accept a camera-ready PDF, since it turns out that the publishers often want PDF and the reason the editor wants Word is so he can edit the text, but when the editor can't or won't budge, is there any alternative to reformatting the document entirely in Word or a clone?

The larger question this raises is, where are we going? Even if formats are open, translation is difficult if they are only commensurable at a very low level. Is the solution to write in something very abstract like DocBook? And if so, will the market go this way?"
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Converting TeX to Microsoft Word? More

Converting TeX to Microsoft Word?

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  • LaTeX2rtf (Score:5, Informative)

    by Noksagt ( 69097 ) on Tuesday September 06, 2005 @07:04PM (#13494567) Homepage
    The F/OSS LaTeX2rtf [sourceforge.net] is probably your best bet. Coverts cross-references, eps pictures to jpeg, or png (pdflatex users will be happy to know rtf supports jpeg and png), equations to either an EQ field or to a bitmap picture, and does tables right. It isn't perfect, but it is good.

    • Re:LaTeX2rtf (Score:4, Informative)

      by belmolis ( 702863 ) <billposer@[ ]m.mit.edu ['alu' in gap]> on Tuesday September 06, 2005 @10:02PM (#13495913) Homepage

      I tried LaTeX2rtf but as its name says, it converts LaTeX and I've got plain TeX with lots of my own macros.

      • Inevitable Frustration (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Noksagt ( 69097 ) on Wednesday September 07, 2005 @12:23AM (#13496831) Homepage
        Unfortunately, most of the converters will do only a subset of the markup languages & so few (if any) will work well with custom macros.

        The Chikrii TeX2Word MIGHT do it. TeX4ht may also be worth a try (->HTML/XML, which can easily become other formats). Can't comment on TeXPort. Those are really your only options. If worse-comes-to-worse, you can also look fo ps/pdf->word solutions, but those are just as bad as (La)TeX->Word.
        • TeX4HT certainly works, and not just for plain TeX, and M$-Word has no problem in opening the HTML it produces. LaTeX2HTML also does a reasonable job. You will always have to do some tidying-up no matter what conversion you use between any two formats, as there is almost always a mismatch in the facilities provided.

          If you are doing a lot of writing, I recommend looking at moving to XML. That way you can keep using LaTeX as your preferred formatter (via an XLST transformation XML-->LaTeX) but also have o

    • Re:LaTeX2rtf (Score:3, Informative)

      by d^2b ( 34992 )
      tex4ht (as google) will work for plain TeX.
      It basically processes the dvi file, so I doubt the
      output is nice.

  • What journals? (Score:5, Informative)

    by epsalon ( 518482 ) * <slash@alon.wox.org> on Tuesday September 06, 2005 @07:04PM (#13494575) Homepage Journal
    Most journals I've worked with accept TeX/LaTeX or PDF files, given that you use the journal's .sty file (which they supply). I've never seen a scientific journal which doesn't accepd LaTeX output. Some don't accept MS-Word.

    If it's only a few journals, I guess no respectable researcher would submit to those, so just submit to better journals.

    • Re:What journals? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by biodork ( 25036 ) on Tuesday September 06, 2005 @07:21PM (#13494724)
      I would guess you are in the Computer field and not in a biologically oriented field. In those, Word is pretty close to the only answer and TeX is an unknown. I would say TeX is VERY restricted to the fields it is accepted in, and pretty much unknown outside of those.

      • Re:What journals? (Score:5, Informative)

        by belmolis ( 702863 ) <billposer@[ ]m.mit.edu ['alu' in gap]> on Tuesday September 06, 2005 @10:13PM (#13496000) Homepage

        I'm in Linguistics, which covers a lot of areas with different publishing needs and different journals. Some journals fall more-or-less into the math and CS camp and want TeX. One leading journal the last I knew preferred Postscript (I wonder if they now prefer PDF - have to check). Some of them until fairly recently didn't make any specific demands because they still remember the days when everything came in on paper or in a zillion incompatible word processor formats. The problem is that MS Word has so dominated the market outside of some technical fields that they just assume that everybody uses Word. One editor asked me for the electronic version of the paper, without saying anything about the format. When I emailed him the TeX file, he had no idea what it was.

        To some extent of course you can favor journals that accept convenient formats, but there are a lot of limitations on that. Sometimes the paper really should go to a particular journal in order to reach the appropriate audience and/or in order to get the most brownie points. Sometimes you commit the paper before you know who the publisher will be and what format it will want. That happens with conference proceedings, Festschriften, edited collections, and so forth. And some journals don't say anything up front, so if you don't think to ask in advance, you end up in the situation in which you've invested a lot of time and energy getting the paper revised and accepted, the journal has also invested time and energy, and you really don't want to pull out at that point.

        • There's pretty good support for linguistics (phonetic fonts and packages, for example) in LaTeX, so that shouldn't be a major barrier.

          ... you end up in the situation in which you've invested a lot of time and energy getting the paper revised and accepted, the journal has also invested time and energy, and you really don't want to pull out at that point.

          In an ideal world, neither would they, and if they can't support TeX or LaTeX directly, they might be willing to reset the thing in their godawful word

      • TeX or PDF (Score:2, Informative)

        by SgtChaireBourne ( 457691 )
        TeX or LaTex is used in many fields, especially mathematics, physics, linguistics and economics. (Can you spot the connection?)

        Other journals accept or even require PDF -- it cuts down on the MS virus problem and guarantees correct rendering, unlike what you get with the diverse MS Word formats.

    • Re:What journals? (Score:3, Informative)

      by Noksagt ( 69097 )
      I've never seen a scientific journal which doesn't accepd LaTeX output. Some don't accept MS-Word.
      Most will accept PDF, fewer postscript, and fewer still LaTeX. Many who do accept LaTeX also say their preferred format is Word 97 or something similar. A lot of the Elsevier journals really want Word. And Elsevier publishes a rather lot of the journals out there....

      • Re:What journals? (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        A lot of the Elsevier journals really want Word. And Elsevier publishes a rather lot of the journals out there....

        Sounds like braindead management. You'd think 'scientists' would know better than to demand a closed undocumented proprietary standard for publishing something that is supposed to be open and accessible.
    • The submitter's homepage (http://billposer.org/ [billposer.org]) says that he is a Adjunct Professor of Linguistics at the University of British Columbia, so I guess that means Linguistics journals.

      But that's just a guess.

  • Keep it simple. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MrHanky ( 141717 ) on Tuesday September 06, 2005 @07:06PM (#13494591) Homepage Journal
    You're not going to get as good output from Word as from TeX, so just forget about keeping the document ready for print. The journals will change the lay-out anyway. You need only to keep the basic structure; paragraphs, chapters, lists, figures, etc. And footnotes.

    I would try converting to html instead of Word, (and maybe to Word from html). There are several command line tools that claim to do this. Since YMMV and all that, I can only suggest that you try it yourself. It shouldn't be too time consuming.
  • Try looking for a TeX to RTF converter that'll handle your documents. If you're as much of a TeX power-user as it sounds like you are though, probably nothing will convert cleanly. At least with RTF you can edit it by hand if worse comes to worst. Word can read/write RTF, so some of your hard-nosed editors may not even notice the difference...
  • It would be interesting to know the field in which you publish. I gather it isn't math or science, so why not just use GNU Texinfo. It would also help if you explained what you write that makes TeX more useful than MS Word. You mentioned DocBook, but have you tried it? I guess latex2rtf (http://latex2rtf.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]) doesn't work so well either, hunh?

    • Re:What field (Score:3, Informative)

      by oostevo ( 736441 )
      The submitter's homepage says that he is a professor of linguistics at the University of British Columbia.

      In fact, here are some of this papers: http://www.billposer.org/papers.html [billposer.org]

    • I'm in Linguistics and do a pretty wide range of research, so depending on the paper I may need phonetic notation, all manner of writing systems, trees and other diagrams, equations, photographs, maps, and complex tables. I use TeX for several reasons. One is inertia. I switched years ago from troff to TeX, got to be pretty good at it, and haven't been strongly motivated to switch. Although I've used LaTeX a little, by the time I looked into it I had a lot invested in low-level TeX stuff that did what I wa

      • I do strongly recommend that you try moving to LaTeX. TeX is a layout markup language like (old-style) HTML or troff - it allows you to control how your text is displayed. LaTeX, on the other hand, is a semantic markup language - it allows you to define the structure of your document. The macros used to create LaTeX are then expanded to TeX which controls the layout. You may find that most of your custom TeX macros are duplicates of things already available in LaTeX.

        Docbook is a similar concept, but I

  • Let them know. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Noksagt ( 69097 ) on Tuesday September 06, 2005 @07:15PM (#13494665) Homepage
    This has increasingly caused problems with publishing in journals.
    You are a contributor to the journal. You donate content gratis, which makes Elsevier/Oxford/whoever fat. Let them know you are distressed they don't take LaTeX submissions and/or at-least camera-ready PDFs. Any who have recently stopped supporting LaTeX can be encouraged to start again. Even some journals which haven't taken LaTeX submissions recently have switched due to scientist-demand.
    but my queries as to whether it can handle home-brew Metafont fonts,
    Yeah--good luck with that. metafont->ttf conversion is very tricky. Furthermore, the journals don't really like weird fonts (once they get the DOCs, they often strip ALL formatting). You can go metafont->postscript image->wmf/emf. It is far from ideal
    but when the editor can't or won't budge, is there any alternative to reformatting the document entirely in Word or a clone?
    Ask them what formats they will accept and for which reasons. Many are happy as long as they are able to extract plain-text from your document.
    Is the solution to write in something very abstract like DocBook?
    This would be an O.K. solution. It would allow you to go to RTF or typeset with LaTeX. But it is both less powerful than LaTeX & less "friendly" than Word.
    And if so, will the market go this way?"
    The publishers are dependent on content. A lot of your peers probably do use Word. It is important to know that you can influence which way the market goes & to let them know your preferences.

    • Re:Let them know. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Geoffreyerffoeg ( 729040 ) on Tuesday September 06, 2005 @08:09PM (#13495062)
      but my queries as to whether it can handle home-brew Metafont fonts,

      Yeah--good luck with that. metafont->ttf conversion is very tricky. Furthermore, the journals don't really like weird fonts (once they get the DOCs, they often strip ALL formatting). You can go metafont->postscript image->wmf/emf. It is far from ideal

      Let me ask...why do you need (or even have) custom fonts if you're publishing in a journal which will want its own house style anyway? If you're using them for text (in any language) or common symbols, use the journal's font, not yours. If you're using them for obscure symbols or non-text hacks with fonts, just render it into a picture and be done with it.

      And by saying TeX but not LaTeX, are you implying you're doing something in pure TeX? What can you do in there that can't be done in LaTeX and won't make an editor want to reformat it and can be reasonably exported to Word without losing the reason for it being in TeX?

      • I've answered above about reasons for using TeX. One factor that has changed is fonts. Not very long ago, there simply were not generally available fonts for some of the writing systems that I work with, in particular the so-called "Carrier syllabics" [ydli.org]. This has changed with Unicode taking off - not only are most writing systems encoded, but there are fonts available for them. So, yes, one thing I can do and have done is to strip the TeX formatting, convert the TeX macros for unusual characters to Unicode,

        • I've been looking over your comments in this discussion, and also comparing this to what my girlfriend deals with (she's working on a linguistics PhD, and uses LaTeX for much of her work for similar reasons to you). I get the impression that you strongly prefer a "programmatic" approach to WYSIWYG, and ultimately you mostly produce plain-text-ish files with a wide range of characters, some limited formatting, and various custom diagrams. You also sound pretty technically competent generally. Is that about r

  • Use your own! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Ratso Baggins ( 516757 ) on Tuesday September 06, 2005 @07:16PM (#13494668) Homepage
    1. Print you document's TeX source code on rice paper.

    2. Eat printed code.

    3. Wait 12-24 hours.

    4. Collect the word docs at "the other end".

  • Why don't you....TRY OUT THE SOFTWARE? (Score:3, Informative)

    by Noksagt ( 69097 ) on Tuesday September 06, 2005 @07:33PM (#13494813) Homepage
    One [chikrii.com] claims to use a full-scale TeX interpreter, but my queries as to whether it can handle home-brew Metafont fonts, PIC graphics etc. have gone unanswered.
    I've use Chikrii Softlab's products & they are good. Not something I'd shell out $100/license for, but good. One of the best things about them is that they offer 30-day evaluations. So you don't need to get your queries answered by them--you can make basic examples to test & see for yourself.
  • Doesn't it make more sense to have content seperate from presentation when preparing articles for journals. Surely they must do some editing and layout changes and stuff. latex does a pretty damn good job or being "generic" unless you use non-standnard templates or whatnot. I sure as hell don't like spending hours laying things out then to have it all in the first place yet have it be "re-processed" later on. What confuses me more is so many scientists and engineers use latex in the first place. I see autho
    • I don't even use latex or tex and I can answer this.

      Both concentrate more on content and allow correct mathematic symbols to be used rather than on formating.

      Word sucks, for that matter so does Open Office writer. Both are good for short letters, and documents, but when it comes to accurately reproducing symbols, mathematics and physics concepts and numbers there is nothing better for that kind of formatting.

      Also Tex and latex will print exactly it's shown. Yuo know exact how things will look when your do

  • Dear slashot.. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 06, 2005 @08:13PM (#13495113)
    I have a large application written Common Lisp. It makes heavy use of macros and is written in a functional paradigm. Also, it uses a sophisticated code-walker macro to optimize the code and convert it to CPS style, and includes a full Java JVM written in Lisp to ease training new hires, as well as a type inference engine. About 50% uses CLOS multimethods and "around" methods.

    However, my new manager only knows Visual Basic on Windows 95. How can I translate? I'm pretty sure it's not a "1-to-1" port. For instance, how do I do continuations in VB? Thanks!

    • I wish I had mod points. This is really funny.

    • Man, some people are so dumb. It can't be done in Visual Basic, you need VB.NET. Unlike VB which is a meerly a superset of C++, VB.NET is a whole new paradigm shift and includes LISP portability through ActiveX. CPS and JVM are replaced with DHTML and CLOS multimethods are practically apartement model shared memory DLLs without null terminated string checking inefficiency.

      Then your application could run in the Internet.

      Honestly, get a MSCE then you're allowed to psot on slashdot.
    • Would that this hadn't already happened [paulgraham.com]. Yahoo! Stores was rewritten from highly-sophisticated Lisp to C++. And it shows...

  • Keep using LaTeX (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mcelrath ( 8027 ) on Tuesday September 06, 2005 @08:22PM (#13495197) Homepage
    LaTeX, quite simply, is the world standard for scientific documents, and it should stay that way. You simply cannot enter complex mathematics in any word processor.

    If your journal is telling you that they won't accept latex, tell them you won't submit your articles anymore, thank you very much.

    In physics we have it good due to the existence of the arXiv [arxiv.org], where we put our articles first. Therefore journals are already limited by the fact that your article is already published on the web, and they have to accept the consequences of that. e.g. they cannot have too draconian copyright terms. I know in many disciplines the situation with journals is much worse. But remember, journals are totally dependent on us, the scientists, and not the other way around. With the advent of the web and email we can diseminate our work to our colleagues and perform peer review all without the intervention of a journal.

    The physics community accepts latex as the standard, and people are (rightfully) suspicious of articles which appear on the arxiv in only .doc or .pdf format.

    So, I suggest you keep using latex, investigate adding a section to the arxiv for your specialty, and tell your journal that they will accept latex or be replaced.

    -- Bob

    • But you are in physics and he is in lingustics. His publisher does'nt accept TeX and has refused to already.
    • Additionally, he is not using LaTex, he is using Tex + his own customizations.
    • The poster doesn't use LaTeX, he uses TeX. TeX by itself only supports layout. LaTeX is a set of macros built on top of TeX to support semantic markup, which makes it a lot nicer to use than TeX.
    • With the advent of the web and email we can diseminate our work to our colleagues and perform peer review all without the intervention of a journal.
      Speaking of which, I notice you use ZWiki; check out WikiTeX [wikisophia.org], which, in addition to plenary AMS, supports Feynman diagrams, graphs (Graphviz) and plots (Gnuplot).
      • Thanks for the link. Actually I am the nominal maintainer of LatexWiki [mcelrath.org] which is a latex plugin for ZWiki. However, I have decided to abandon it due to some disagreements with the ZWiki maintainer.

        I looked at WikiTeX and mediawiki long ago, and the reason I decided against it is that it does not align equations with the surrounding text, the fonts look vastly different tex/html, and the input syntax is very un-latexlike.

        Right now I have an experimental combination of jsMath and tiddlywiki that is prett

    • i cannot see how this comment is insightful.

      parent writes:
      "If your journal is telling you that they won't accept latex, tell them you won't submit your articles anymore, thank you very much."

      do you really think a high ranking (or any) journal would accept such an attitude from a single scientist? they would likely laugh at your arrogance. in a world where the rule is "publish or perish", your suggestion is not an option.
      • If the scientific community as a whole wants it bad enough, it will happen.

        Have a small session at conferences discussing the importance of this, and encouraging the community to boycott certain journals.

        In every field, there is more than one journal...

        • "If the scientific community as a whole wants it bad enough, it will happen"

          i agree 100%. i merely stated that *individual* action - as suggested in the post i replied to - would likely decrease the chances to publish, which is exactly the opposite of what a scientist would want.

  • Stop obsessing and get back to writing. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by planetfinder ( 879742 ) on Tuesday September 06, 2005 @11:26PM (#13496466)
    Compromise a little, use LaTex.
    You can probably live with the crushing limitations relative to using TeX :-)

    And, if there's no other way then use MS Word, its character building (bad pun intended). I'd say that it won't kill you but if you have a lot of equations it might. After about 15 pages of equation intensive stuff you end up using the find function instead of scrolling because it gets so bogged down. It also regularly decides that your equation laden document won't fit on the XX or so gigbytes of free space on your harddrive. It has a long standing bug that causes it to miscalculate the size of some formulas so that no matter how much space you have left on your drive it won't save your document until you remove the offending equation segment. Hilarious, I know. I'd send a document with the problem in it to MS so that they could see the bug but then I can't save the document to send it to them. Chuckle chuckle. Those funny guys at MS have such a great sense of humor. They're worth every hundred dollar bill I send them for their fine products (sarcasm intended). What's really over the top is that people look me straight in the eye and tell me that they never have a problem using Word. Since all my friends are completely honest about anything regarding their computer use (oh dear, more sarcasm, must be past my bedtime) you can probably safely ignore my ranting.

    I've started using Publicon by WRI. Interesting product. A little bit beta. If you feel like just saying f&$k the editors then this is something that you might like to dink around with even though you say you don't like WYSIWYG. Given your other proclivities I'd suggest taking Publicon for a spin around a document or two. It also claims to export TeX or LaTeX or both and it uses a bibliography database and a bunch of other nice stuff. It has a Mathematica front end so its a nice outlining tool too. The cell thing takes a little getting used to but I've come to really like it.

    • Yeah, I could probably shift to LaTeX for things I haven't yet written, but converting from complex Plain TeX to LaTeX is not trivial.

      Publicon looks interesting. I hadn't heard of it, though I have used the Mathematica notebook interface so that part is not unfamiliar. At the moment it looks like they have it only for MS Windows and Mac OS, but maybe they'll port it to GNU/Linux.

  • where are we going?

    The wrong direction.

    Pay attention. You're obviously not from Massachusetts.

    You should not even be thinking of going to a proprietary format controlled by the darkside.

  • I played around with a variety of converters a couple of weeks ago.  The best luck I had was:
    1) convert (la)TeX to html (there are a number of tools)
    2) read html that into word
    3) save as Word .doc file (or rtf)
    I imagine that OpenOffice would do step 3 fine as well.

  • I use LaTeX2e on a daily basis for a great variety of documents. While at it, I also had to interact at the professional level with people who seem to think that the one and only way to do rich text is with MS Word, so I had to see what could I do to preserve interoperability.

    In the Free Software realm, the two best options seem to be latex2rtf [sourceforge.net] and tex4ht [lrz-muenchen.de].

    The first one, latex2rtf, is the one I use. It works decently, does its job, and does it well. The only glitches I saw are that the resulting document

  • Many aspects of this question baffle me.
    • He says he wants to submit documents in .doc format, but he doesn't want to buy a copy of Word. Huh???? How the heck is he going to look at his .doc file and check that it's correct after translation? (OOo isn't a solution, because it's not 100% compatible with Word.)
    • He acts all self-righteous about not using MS products, but he wants to take the path of least resistance and cave in to a particular journal that wants to use a proprietary MS format???
    • If he's alr
    • I'm not baffled, I'm intimately familiar with this problem. Unfortunately.

      I'm the biological sciences, and not only do most of the major journals accept only electronic submissions, the majority of them _require_ DOC format. They won't take PDF or anything else.

      He says he wants to submit documents in .doc format, but he doesn't want to buy a copy of Word. Huh???? How the heck is he going to look at his .doc file and check that it's correct after translation? (OOo isn't a solution, because it's not 100%

  • Some only work with LaTeX, which doesn't help.
    Why not?

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