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

Re:Ugh.

[jilles]

Mostly editing of journals and conference proceedings is either non profit work or work that is done with a limited budget. Outside of the math community Latex is not used very much (it never was, for obvious reasons of lack of user friendliness).

Editors generally need editable formats. PDF is not very editable (especially pdfs generated from dvis, get those a lot and hate them). Latex is editable but is pretty hard to convert (been there, done that, cost me way too much of my time). Word, like it or not (personally I don't) is a format that can be read on most platforms, including unix variants. Most third party provided wordprocessors have import/export functionality for word that goes way beyond import/export functionality for latex (mostly non existing). Probably the first thing a professional editor does is import the word files into a professional DTP package (at least that's what I would do). Having to deal with tex would be a pain in this case because of all the \, {, } and other latex thingies you need to manually locate and replace by the proper alternatives. (not to mention stuff like reference citations and dealing with eps files that are hard to edit)

I mostly write my own stuff in framemaker. If needed, I can convert to word pretty quickly and meet relevant formatting instructions. Converting from either one to latex is something I will try to avoid since it is generally quite hard and takes a lot of time. Journals that require latex are getting pretty rare in my area of research (Software Engineering) mostly because most researchers in that area use macs/pcs. In the case I encounter a journal that wants tex I simply deliver in word. If they want latex they can typeset it themselves, I have better things to do.

BTW. all those people using latex because of the formulas: Open office now includes a formula editor that can read/write mathml. Converters to and from mathml exist for latex so you can migrate pretty easily. The formula editor itself doesn't look to bad either. OpenOffice is free and can export to word better than anything I've seen before.