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?"

Comments

I had a similar problem

[b_pretender]

The best solution is PDF. LaTeX2html is okay if you can get away with html, and it handles equations the best of any (if converting to a GIF is best). 'tth' is nice, but again, only use it if html is acceptable. 'tth' changes equations into tables and symbol font, which is ideal for simple formulas but LaTeX2html is better for heavy complicated equations.

'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.

Dont accept TeX?

[Gaurang]

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.

Re:Dont accept TeX?

[t]

This is not insightful.

This is arguing that "my vote doesn't count".

Or that researchers should give all rights to their work to the publisher. Doesn't that ring a bell with anyone? To be clear, if you submit a paper to a journal, you can't even offer that paper for download on your own website! Yes that's right YOUR paper, YOUR research, can't be published on YOUR website.

For those of you who don't grok what I'm saying, go on and conform to whatever those "journals" request of you, but don't come crying to us when they require a butt-raping as part of the honor of getting your paper published.

t.

Use google

[Anonymous Coward]

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 $$.

Using LaTeX outside the scientific world

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

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.

Re:Using LaTeX outside the scientific world

[E-prospero]

Most people outside the math community (including of course the other formula heavy communities like computer science, physics, etc.) use word or similarly feature rich word processors. Latex doesn't have these features, nor do adequate conversion tools for latex exist (i.e. tools that preserve structure, crossreferences, formatting and graphics).

Ironically, these "features" of word processors are the biggest hurdle to overcome in publishing. From the publishers perspective, the author should have NO control over the formatting etc or the article to be published.

For example, the IEEE accepts documents in almost any format, including Word, Wordperfect, LaTeX, and hardcopy. When a document is received for publication, the first step taken is to RETYPESET the ENTIRE document (for the record, in SGML). Any formatting information is summarily lost in the conversion process (which is performed by automated text stripping tools).

This display agnostic perspective is exactly what LaTeX promotes: the author has limited control (or should have, with a good style sheet) over the appearance of a document. The author should stick to what they are good at - writing up results.

I severely doubt there is a single serious publishing house that uses Word as their desktop publishing solution. If there is any preference for Word as a submission format, its probably because they have their automated tools already set up to strip text out of Word, and into whatever tools they use internally.

On a personal note: I had the experience of publishing a set of conference proceedings a few years back for a small student conference. From my experience, the single greatest obstacle in producing the proceedings was Word, and its "helpful" auto-typsetting. If I had my time over, the first thing I would have done would be to strip the text from documents, stick it into LaTeX, and write a good style sheet.

Russ %-)