Word To Latex Convert
Edelmar Easley
I have a typical scientific manuscript in a LaTeX .tex file, and I need to convert it to MS Word .doc file. The reason for having to convert to MS Word is I'm submitting the manuscript to an academic journal and they only accept MS Word (I know...)
The manuscript includes title page, figures, tables, equations (inline and in their own align environment), footnotes, bibliography, and an annex. The tables are in their own separate tables.tex file, which I include using the \includetables command. Most tables take up a whole landscape page, and were generated sing the package pdflscape. I am using Windows 7 Professional.
My plan is to use pandoc to go from .tex to .odt, open the latter in Libre Office, and convert to .doc. I have read a related question but it is too general. Similarly the examples in the Pandoc website are too simple. I have played around but I am unable to accomplish what I want. This is surprising since converting a scientific manuscript is probably the most common use case for Pandoc. Here are some sample failures:
where figure1 is the name of a figure file (e.g. figure1.png) in the project folder referenced in a line as \includegraphics[width=5.8in]figure1. I suspect pandoc expects a .png extension but not sure how to provide it.
The program executes fine. I open HTML file. Footnotes are there but figures are missing, tables are displayed as LaTeX, bibliography is missing, in-line math displays well, but math in align environment does not, section labels are displayed, and some other minor issues.
Eventually, and surprisingly, I found the most satisfactory way to convert is to just open the PDF file in MS Word (2013 or newer), which retained most of the layout. Although you are gonna lose the hyperlinks of cross-references.
If you are set on using pandoc, the simplest solution may be to just identify environments and packages that cause trouble - and then not use them, or just type the offending stuff directly in to MS Word.
I've had a fair amount of luck with going to word documents using latex2rtf to create an .rtf that then gets converted, rather than going through pandoc. As I wrote in Hide output, but maintain the cross-references, my solution has been to put a very tight cap on the packages that are used when creating a tex document that you know will be converted. This is because a lot of problems with conversion from .tex to .rtf are caused by optional packages and environments that are not supported.
See for a demo of a class that gives you a file that can be converted with latex2rtf to .rtf and thus to .docx. Bonus: this class almost(!) gives you a tagged PDF that passes automated testing for tags (the fabled 508 compliance).
LaTeX2rtf is the easiest and fastest way to convert .tex files to .rtf that can be read by Microsoft Word. Using it is as simple as downloading the program, choosing your .tex file, and pressing run. A command window will open up to display the progress and warn of any errors. In most cases the default settings will be sufficient and despite errors it can usually output something useable.
Pandoc's LaTeX importer may not handle every input very well, but when you go via Pandoc's markdown format, which maps basically one-to-one to Pandoc's internal document representation, you have precise control over the output.
I write my APA6th papers with LaTeX and export them with all beauty to PDF. Normally this is all I need. Sometimes publisher ask for word files (the reason why I don't know...). So I was on the search to a decent pdf to word converter since simpletex4th has table issues and I need tables a lot. The only converter I am satisfied with is PDF to Word + by Lighten Software Limited for Mac. The docx generated has NO differences from the PDF output and is perfectly editable. This works much better than these tex to xxx converters. -to-word-converter-mac.html -to-word-converter.html
This should produce document.odt. You can convert this to Word using OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice. A short tutorial is here. Unfortunately, this may fail for long documents. Another option is to first compile with latex (not pdflatex) and then
For long documents, I have had good results by converting the output pdf to Word. There are quite a few pdf to Word converters.[Adobe Acrobat, online converters, of other freeware.] that work pretty well.
I've found this free online pdf converter to be superior to Word's PDF conversion tool. They both make a mess of equations, but pdf2docx retains document formatting and references much better than Word's conversion tool.
Indeed, there is almost a perfect way to do so. But you have to pay for that, the solution is Tex2Word. In order to get the best results, firstly you change to the the basic document class, e.g. article and avoid using self-defined styles. If you are using bibtex, then you just copy the content in bbl file to the tex file. Finally, open your tex file with MS Word (Yes! It is so easy!). All the equations, images and cross-references will be translated into MS word! The equations are native MS word equation or MathType rather than images. I would say that there is no better solution now.
All, I am still using the Mac version of Acrobat XI (version 11.0.23 -- but I don't think this matters). It does a very good job of duplicating the LaTeX produced pdf into Word. Does it look as good as the real thing? Noooo. Of course not. But it suffices. BUT, each time I do this, I write a personal note to the journal Editor (both Executive Editor and the Action Editor for my manuscript if these are different people) and explain the beauty and glory of LaTeX while urging them to bring this up with the publisher. Note that OverLeaf now provides a long list of journals that let you submit your .tex and all other necessary files directly from OL (you don't have to think about this, OL does the thinking for you). It works!
I write my homeworks in latex using exam.sty (makes creating key easy). My homeworks include figures and these are not well placed in the above solutions. I used to use GrindEq (it's a great product if you work in Windoze), but here's a solution that works for me on linux using docs.google.com website.
I am a final year graduate student and I have my thesis (about 350 pages) in Microsoft Word format. I would like to convert the document into a LaTeX "camera" ready PDF. Is there any easy way to do this?I am very new to LateX..
New version of writer2latex is pretty good. It works with the Open Office, but I think their command line utility should work without the OO. You can set quality of the converted document - from LaTeX as clean as possible, to version which tries to emulate appearance of source word document.
The free open source word processor AbiWord has an MS Word import function, and, if you install it (be sure to check it under install time, or if on Linux, install the necessary plugin package), a LaTeX export function. It works decently well for simple documents.
I am somewhat late to the party, as the question's author has, hopefully, graduated. But, for the sake of completeness of answers, I'd like to mention a universal (and now very popular) format converter pandoc ( ), which is open source and supports an extremely wide variety of document formats, including presentation slides and e-books.
You can't convert MS Word document to LaTeX directly. The two formats are rather incompatible. Last time I had to do it (a 4-page paper written by my Prof) I saved it as text-only and readded all formatting, math, images and tables manually. As you can guess it was quite an effort which is not doable for a 350 pages document, except in the unlikely case that it would really be all text with minimal formatting (some arts thesis maybe?).
Have also a look on What is the best way to make the transition from Microsoft Word to LaTeX? or on Convert TeX to non-TeX and back, but I don't think you will get away easy with this task in any case.
Latex is a type setting language, and through programs such as pdflatex, you can turn this into a pdf file. It is certainly not the only way to create a pdf file. If creating a pdf from your word file is your ultimate goal, then there are much more sensible ways to do this.
When installed, this will become a print driver on your computer. Basically you go into Word, and tell it to print your document and then select PDFcreator as your printer. It will go through various options and ultimately create your pdf for you.
There will still be manual editing to do, but at least the major parts will be done for you - doc envelope, sectioning and other trivial stuff. So that you won't have to hunt a plain text file for the chapter/section titles.
If you're running an AppleScript-compatible operating system, I've written a script to do this. It has many limitations as far as pictures go (totally unsupported), but it handles the essentials (bold, italics, underscores, percent signs, dollar signs, tables (in tabu)). Note that it keeps everything in unicode, therefore the fontspec package is recommended with xelatex. It is a work in progress.
This is probably a bit too late, but 350 pages of conversion is a lot. You could try the following tools people have suggested above such as WordtoLatex, writer2latex or rtf2latex2e, but I doubt you will be able to go through all 350 pages without any hassle. Especially with tables, images and all. It might though take you a month to do this carefully!
If you have completed all the 350 pages in word (man, that should have taken long!), then I'd recommend using one of the paid services available and just get it converted. You could try maybe Word to Latex, Word LaTeX or something similar although I agree it is hard to find one!
word2tex seems like a pretty decent commercial option. Unfortunately, it only runs on Windows OS. It provides a "save as tex" option in the "Save As" dialog box. It also has dialog box that allows a wide range of configuration options.
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