Latex Word Converter
Annette Fazzari
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 have a latex document on Overleaf that contains equations and mathematical symbols and I want to convert my document to the Word version, I transformed my .tex document to .pdf then I used an online converter for pdf to Word, but all the equations get ruined.
Here's one trick that may or may not be suitable for your purposes: if latex2rtf does a good enough conversion (I have no idea how it compares to the converter you are using), just rename its output from whatever.rtf to whatever.doc, and Word will open it just fine. Now if the recipient of the document wants to edit it, she may notice that it is actually not in the usual Word format, but, hey, Word behaves strangely all the time anyway.
Another trick is to convert the output of TeX into images of pages and embed them in a Word document one by one - this preserves the exact layout from TeX and will obviously be useless for anything other than printing (and the print quality will likely be worse than you get by just printing the original), but technically it is a Word document.
I tried many free solutions, but my LaTeX document was too complicated. In the end, commercially available GrindEQ did the best job by far. If you only need to do this once, you can use the demo version.
Lyx bundles away some of the command-line stuff so that you can export straight to the ODT file (assuming you have tex4ht installed on the path), so that might save you a few keystrokes. I'd be surprised if Kile doesn't have similar output helpers.
Sometimes you just have to face the absolute horror of having to convert your beautiful latex documents into word. As an engineer your biggest worry is, oh crap, will my equations come out right!? Fear not, we have a solution, it is based on a post I found here by a user named Devid (many thanks Devid!). The best part is that this solution should work with word on mac or windows. I am using office 365 for mac from my school and this works perfectly for me.
Other formats can be produced, such as RTF (which can be used in Microsoft Word) and HTML. However, these documents are produced from software that parses and interprets the LaTeX files, and do not implement all the features available for the primary DVI and PDF outputs. Nonetheless, they do work, and can be crucial tools for collaboration with colleagues who do not edit documents with LaTeX.
This section describes how to generate a screenshot of a LaTeX page or of a specific part of the page using the LaTeX package preview. Screenshots are useful, for example, if you want to include a LaTeX generated formula on a presentation using your favorite slideware like Powerpoint, Keynote or LibreOffice Impress. First, start by making sure you have preview. See Installing Extra Packages.
This package is also very useful to export specific parts to other format, or to produce graphics (e.g. using PGF/TikZ) and then including them in other documents. You can also automate the previewing of specific environments:
Alternatively, PDF-Shuffler is a small python-gtk application, which helps the user to merge or split pdf documents and rotate, crop and rearrange their pages using an interactive and intuitive graphical interface. This program may be available in your Linux distribution's repository.
Three simple shell scripts using the pdfpages package are provided in the pdfjam bundle by D. Firth. They include options to merge several pdf files (pdfjoin), put several pages in one physical sheet (pdfnup) and rotate pages (pdf90).
You can also use XeTeX (or, more precisely, XeLaTeX), which works in the same way as pdflatex: it creates a PDF file directly from LaTeX source. One advantage of XeTeX over standard LaTeX is support for Unicode and modern typographic technologies such as TrueType/OpenType fonts. See its Wikipedia entry for more details.
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