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Converting DVI to Other Formats?
jgrr asks: "I'd like to be able to take a DVI file and convert it to some less palatable format, like MS Word. Some journals I want to submit papers to accept electronic copies as either MS Word or WordPerfect documents, not as TeX. (These are in ecology and zoology, not math journals). People I ask to look at papers don't use TeX either, and like to make the changes to the text itself, so PDF won't work. I know about latex2rtf, but I use some different packages and BiBTeX, and I'd rather not have to re-write the paper in Word after converting it. It seems like the DVI level is better than the TeX level for this, but I can't seem to find any existing software that does it. Any ideas?"
Are all these people on the same platform (Linux/Unix) or are they using Windows?
'ttm' will supposedly convert equations into MathML, but I doubt that the non-DVI/PDF/PS crowd will have anything on their computers to read MathML.
Everything that I ever converted to word/wordperfect, I had to rewrite the equations by hand. There is no other way about it.
Summary: If you are submitting a DVI file to a journal, and that journal requires MSWord, than you had better get a graduate student (they come cheap) to rewrite it in MSWord.
It is genuinely irresponsible for journals to require Word or WordPerfect files.
TeX and its many add-ons provide a truly great and open resource for scientists to record their findings. It is widely available, text based, and non-proprietary. For those scientists who can't figure out a text editor, there are GUI front-ends to TeX. If there is too much resistence to using TeX, then use one of the SGML applications (e.g. Docbook, HTML). Just don't use Word, for cripes sake!
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
If they dont accept TeX, then tell them to shut their magazine and stay shut....!
TeX is simply too great for not being accepted.
I think if you insist, they will start accepting TeX from now on!
However, if all fails, then you can give ppl whom you are going to show for editing, the document in text format, and then do the final submission in PDF.
I have found a solution to Riemann's Hypothesis, but have run out of spac
You can edit PDF just fine. Get Acrobat (not Acrobat reader mind you).
man, if the people in charge of these topics can't figure out how to get out of the MS Word trap, then what kind of fate awaits the ecosystem and those poor animals? (meaning the feathery or furry ones with teeth, claws, beaks and stuff like that, not the drooling idiots who think the keyboard is only useful for typing stuff into word).
My personal solution would be to bite the bullet as I have done in the past. While Word is certainly not my favorite word processor, it's much less of a hassle to use it then to try and deal with oddball file formats.
.pdf file (or other windows-readable format,) and view it in windows. Select the entire document, copy it to the clipboard, and then paste it into Word. As long as the viewer that you use on windows has a decent copy function, you'll have an acceptalbe conversion.
If you still must use TeX, then try this: Convert it to a
I'm in the same boat. As a grad student in sociology, I write all of my papers in LaTeX even though all of my colleagues use Word or WordPerfect. I haven't had any problems so my first question is "Is Word really required?" (Unlike the corporate world, academics tend to have a lot of freedom.)
For my colleagues, I distribute my papers as either PDF or hardcopy. Most people want to edit on a hardcopy version anyway, so they just print off the PDF. Could you just ask your colleagues to edit a hardcopy format? They might be willing to; especially if you explain to them why you don't use a word processor.
Regarding journals, sociology submission guidelines also ask for a "word processor" format (which I read as "Word" or "WordPerfect"). However, I haven't seen any journals that require electronic submission. Most journals require that you send them either 4 or 5 copies of the article or an electronic submission. I prefer to send a hard copy format because that's what's going to be redistributed to the reviewers. And regardless of what anyone says, appearance is important and LaTeX provides a very professional appearance.
If it really is necessary to provide a Word document to your colleagues and/or journals, I think that you're SOL with regard to TeX. Unless I've missed something, TeX, LaTeX, DVI, PS, and PDF can't degrade to a lesser format without losing some, most, or all of the formatting.
In this case, I'd recommend looking into DocBook. I haven't used it myself but, from all accounts, it produces publication quality text. And, if I recall correctly, it can generate TeX, LaTeX, HTML, and RTF. I don't know if RTF can support everything that you would need (for example, I don't know if it can handle images). If it can, great; if it can't, you could always import the document into OpenOffice and go from there.
Since I'm also in academia, I'd be interested in hearing what you decide to do. I'd appreciate it if you could post a response or shoot me an email.
"They" sell DVI to VGA converters. But really it has to be DVI-I. The OS is irrelevent. If only I could buy a DVD player with DVI out. Then I could hook it up to my projector which has DVI, and watch digital movies. (video and sound) Oh. Is there another DVI?
My opinion on this is that if they only support Redmond based formats, to the exclusion of all else, screw them and find someone else to look at and/or publish your papers. I wouldn't take that sort of crap.
Search for word2tex on google. It gives you a company that makes (La)TeX input/output filters
for M$-word. Tried output filter, works reasonably well. However full version costs $$.
Have you considered using Open Office for your documents?? It had AMAZING Import/Export options for MS Office formats. The best I have ever seen.. But it doesn't import DVI. Maybe you could suggest they make a filter for the project or maybe you could copy and past some how...
EA David Gardner -"... but the consumers have proven that actually what they want is fun."
Interesting you mention the issue of (La)TeX being used predominantly by the maths community. (I assume you really mean "scientific", rather that just maths.)
I think LaTeX, at least, is a very under-rated tool for non-scientific work. Even if you don't need the equations and such, it still has excellent support for document structure, citations and cross-references, importing external data and indexing, all significant improvements over the closest equivalents in most word processing packages. The only serious letdown is the table support, which is very powerful, but about as user friendly as a '60s mainframe.
My girlfriend typeset her whole Masters thesis in LaTeX, on my advice and with a little help to start with. She'd never used it before, but is reasonably smart and computer literate. It took her perhaps a day or two to get used to it, then it became second nature to her.
In addition to the basic features mentioned above, since the subject matter of the thesis was Indian literature, we designed a whole font for her to represent the Hindi quotations in their native script. Again, after I showed her the basics, she was quite happy designing her own character set essentially from the ground up using METAFONT.
OK, it's a fairly specialised subject matter, but LaTeX was just the right tool for the job. Using Word would have been a nightmare by comparison, and in contrast to the pre-historic software the rest of her department use to typeset Hindi text -- at a rate of about five seconds per character via a particularly nasty GUI -- its usability was fantastic...
I realise that you said LaTeX is not used "very much" outside the math community, but I would suggest that's as much through lack of awareness as "unfriendly user interface". Anyone who's writing papers is likely to be clever enough to pick up basic LaTeX pretty quickly, whatever their field. I've taught it to several people now, and I think every single one preferred it once they'd got past the first week's inevitable "how do I do <something simple>?" phase. And of course, given the plentiful support resources available (some excellent books, the comp.text.tex newsgroup, etc.) they can continue to use it now without any further help from me.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
miktex, the neater distro for windows
also comes with pdftex/pdflatex
besides, it comes with dvipdfm to onverti fi you don't have source code (teTeX does it too)
Math is the weapon!!
PDF is swell as a format to print from. Or squint at on the screen, but it doesn't exactly edit nicely. I don't know what the answer is for editable collaboration between word-users and the TeX-users. Part of the problem is that all of the conversions are (as you note) rather lossy. People who use TeX tend to care. People who use Word or WP for documents with any math in them by definition don't care what they look like :-)
Depending on the politics of the situation, it
may be feasible for the one person to use
LyX
(or perhaps TeXmacs) and the other to edit TeX.
This gets over (more or less) the "TeX is hard" objection, but it does require a pretty big hassle for Windows users (Install an X server? Is that
for Pr0n?).
In academia, time is always in short supply. There are people in ecology who know and love TeX, but not everyone does (I don't). Believe me, if you waste reviewers time by forcing them to learn/use tools they are not familiar with they might not say anything but most will resent it (I would). Save your individuality for your research. It's tough enough getting tenure in ecology without fighting battles you don't need to. I'd use Word or WP with Endnote like everyone else does. If you don't want to send your money to Bill Gates, then there is always Star Office or Open Office, I suppose.
There's a utility to convert to DVI to plain text (for viewing on a terminal, hence "tty") called dvi2tty (search Google or CTAN). However, it doesn't do a pretty job.
There have been various tex2... WordPerfect/etc converters over the years, but none of them seem to handle complex TeX or be very robust. Check the TeX FAQ (via TUG).
Ade_
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