Best Free Word To Latex Converter
Margarita Lovvorn
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.
This website is in beta state but is constantly improving.If you follow all guidelines then you can get pretty descent ".tex" code and ".pdf". If you face any issues ,leave them a message and they will fix it.
There is It is a result of the Bachelor thesis "Word-to-LaTeX convertor by Michal Kebrt. I was one of the early testers and it produced really good results. The free version of 1.2 from 2007 is still floating around the net: -freebies.de/board/viewtopic.php?t=14932
According to my experience, the best results are obtained with GrindEq (which is shareware, unfortunately). The resulting TeX document still requires a lot of work, but at least MathType equations are transformed correctly.
The title says it all: In 2021, which MS Word to LaTeX conversion tool works best? By now, there is a myriad of options, both free and commercial, some involving first converting to .odf and then to LaTeX, others converting directly from .docx to LaTeX. One hardly knows where to get started. So does anyone have good experience about which one holds up best in 2021?
I have used Word2TeX many years ago (trial version) and it is very good also actually. See the link. The proof that Word2TeX it is very good is that exists also in CTAN reference: But it is not a free or gratis software.
I also had a long-standing problem with word-to-latex and latex-to-word conversion. Finally, I soved this problem for my real life needs. I just asked the AI chatbots in Telegram. I asked them again and again until wrote two Word macros for word-to-latex and latex-to-word conversion. I want to share them with everyone who will find them useful.
Some remarks: For everyday needs I use MS Word 97, sometimes MS Word 2007. I write equations in MS Word EQ field codes. Something like eq \f(1;2) written in MS Word give me vertical fraction 1/2. Curved brackets actually is a field code brackets inserted by pressing Ctrl-F9. Professionally I still working at Windows XP (today is 26 June 2024), feel happy. Russian language settings of the system. On English language settings listing divisor is comma ",", while on Russian it is ";". So you see ";" in my example above. Unfortunately, Microsoft has discontinued support for the EQ field in Word2018 and later.
Obviosly, I don't give my files written in codes out. Who can understand them? For journals or conferences, I need to convert for something understandable for everyone: MS Equation 3.0, MathType, or Latex. Sometimes I need to convert from these common formats to MS EQ format I use.
MathType understands Word2007 and later, Mathematica, Latex, and Equation 3.0 and can convert them to Latex. So today I can convert Latex to MS EQ and MS EQ to Latex. The ring is finally closed. The source of my macros is here along with two test files Latex.doc and Word.doc): _m-m8fHQb_gkywKCL
To install it in Word just press Alt-F11 in Word. VBA project is opened. Find in left tree under bold Normal the Module "NewMacros" (or create it) and paste provided code to the end of the code window in the center. Save Normal.dot by pressing Ctrl-S or button with floppy disk icon. You can close VBA window.
To work with the macros, you need to switch the fields to codes (in Word Alt-F9 - switch back and forth). To see EQ field formulas on English language system settings you need to change listing divisor to ";".
I wrote my undergrad thesis using Word. Overall I managed to get the job done, but as with all WYSIWYG editors, by the end I feel like I had created a bit of a mess. It didn't show, but I know it's there.Soon I'm going to start writing my postgrad thesis, and I'd like to use a tool that gives me more control over the single elements. The obvious choice seems to be LaTeX, but as I'm going to be writing a thesis about humanistic matters, I wouldn't be using all its advanced features. Also, it's something I don't know, and it would take me a while to learn how to use it properly.
But here's what I was thinking. I know HTML. I know CSS. (I used to be a web developer, as a matter of fact.) Is it possible to use them for typesetting in an effective way? I think about XML and how it may be used with a specific schema to declare semantic tags, but of course that would need either a converter or a very complex XSLT.
No, just no. HTML and CSS were designed for looking good on screen, not paper. Although there are CSS styles for page printing, using a medium for a purpose other than its original design will at best be an overkill (if it works) and in most cases a utter source of frustration.
This is the basic misconception. You will use all advanced features even in a humanities thesis. You will have inline references, bibliography entries (bibtex), links to bibliographic entries, figures, title pages, perhaps even tables etc. As you see, you are going to use much of the advanced features of LaTeX, regardless of your discipline. LaTeX has an increased initial learning curve, but in the long run it is worth this time investment.
Consider using Markdown + pandoc to generate LaTeX, while being easier to write. Something like this workflow for a Linguistics dissertation: -to-write-a-dissertation-in-latex-using-markdown/
pandoc is a powerful conversion tool, allowing you to convert between markdown, LaTeX, Word, etc. It will potentially even allow you to embed certain HTML and/or LaTeX elements into the markdown, giving you occasional access to either domain as necessary.
For good quality publishing you need more than that, which explains the domain which (La)TeX was designed to operate in. If you need a WYSIWYG editor that gives you much better control over individual elements than Word does, you can test Adobe InDesign or similar software. The concept is that you prepare your content elsewhere and design how the content is going to be displayed, then you plug-in your text in the placeholders which you have styled.
The issue here is the learning curve. No matter if you go with (La)TeX or InDesign or anything similar to that (Scribus is a free alternative for instance), it will take you a significant amount of time to get down and dirty with the software and to be able to create exactly what you want to do. So the question is; what would you rather spend your time on, learning how to make a more visually appealing thesis, or generate the content of the thesis.
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