Converting TeX to Microsoft Word?

belmolis asks: "For many years I've done almost all of my writing in TeX. This has increasingly caused problems with publishing in journals. For a long time, many journals reset what you sent them, so they didn't care what program you used. More and more, I find, they do, and in most cases, what they want is MS Word. Is there any good way to convert TeX to Word?" "I've seen some advertised. Some only work with LaTeX, which doesn't help. One claims to use a full-scale TeX interpreter, but my queries as to whether it can handle home-brew Metafont fonts, PIC graphics etc. have gone unanswered. These products also all seem to be plugins for MS Word. I don't use MS Windows or any other MS products, and hate WYSIWYG word processors (I hated Bravo before it was reincarnated as Word) so a Word plugin is not a great solution, even if it works.

Furthermore, I wonder what exactly these programs do. If they interpret the TeX and then generate very low level Word, that may result in a document that looks similar, but a journal editor probably won't be able to edit it the way he wants to. In some cases the editor can be persuaded to accept a camera-ready PDF, since it turns out that the publishers often want PDF and the reason the editor wants Word is so he can edit the text, but when the editor can't or won't budge, is there any alternative to reformatting the document entirely in Word or a clone?

The larger question this raises is, where are we going? Even if formats are open, translation is difficult if they are only commensurable at a very low level. Is the solution to write in something very abstract like DocBook? And if so, will the market go this way?"

Comments

LaTeX2rtf

[Noksagt]

The F/OSS LaTeX2rtf is probably your best bet. Coverts cross-references, eps pictures to jpeg, or png (pdflatex users will be happy to know rtf supports jpeg and png), equations to either an EQ field or to a bitmap picture, and does tables right. It isn't perfect, but it is good.

Re:LaTeX2rtf

[belmolis]

I tried LaTeX2rtf but as its name says, it converts LaTeX and I've got plain TeX with lots of my own macros.

What journals?

[epsalon]

Most journals I've worked with accept TeX/LaTeX or PDF files, given that you use the journal's .sty file (which they supply). I've never seen a scientific journal which doesn't accepd LaTeX output. Some don't accept MS-Word.

If it's only a few journals, I guess no respectable researcher would submit to those, so just submit to better journals.

Re:What journals?

[belmolis]

I'm in Linguistics, which covers a lot of areas with different publishing needs and different journals. Some journals fall more-or-less into the math and CS camp and want TeX. One leading journal the last I knew preferred Postscript (I wonder if they now prefer PDF - have to check). Some of them until fairly recently didn't make any specific demands because they still remember the days when everything came in on paper or in a zillion incompatible word processor formats. The problem is that MS Word has so dominated the market outside of some technical fields that they just assume that everybody uses Word. One editor asked me for the electronic version of the paper, without saying anything about the format. When I emailed him the TeX file, he had no idea what it was.

To some extent of course you can favor journals that accept convenient formats, but there are a lot of limitations on that. Sometimes the paper really should go to a particular journal in order to reach the appropriate audience and/or in order to get the most brownie points. Sometimes you commit the paper before you know who the publisher will be and what format it will want. That happens with conference proceedings, Festschriften, edited collections, and so forth. And some journals don't say anything up front, so if you don't think to ask in advance, you end up in the situation in which you've invested a lot of time and energy getting the paper revised and accepted, the journal has also invested time and energy, and you really don't want to pull out at that point.

Let them know.

[Noksagt]

This has increasingly caused problems with publishing in journals.

You are a contributor to the journal. You donate content gratis, which makes Elsevier/Oxford/whoever fat. Let them know you are distressed they don't take LaTeX submissions and/or at-least camera-ready PDFs. Any who have recently stopped supporting LaTeX can be encouraged to start again. Even some journals which haven't taken LaTeX submissions recently have switched due to scientist-demand.

but my queries as to whether it can handle home-brew Metafont fonts,

Yeah--good luck with that. metafont->ttf conversion is very tricky. Furthermore, the journals don't really like weird fonts (once they get the DOCs, they often strip ALL formatting). You can go metafont->postscript image->wmf/emf. It is far from ideal

but when the editor can't or won't budge, is there any alternative to reformatting the document entirely in Word or a clone?

Ask them what formats they will accept and for which reasons. Many are happy as long as they are able to extract plain-text from your document.

Is the solution to write in something very abstract like DocBook?

This would be an O.K. solution. It would allow you to go to RTF or typeset with LaTeX. But it is both less powerful than LaTeX & less "friendly" than Word.

And if so, will the market go this way?"

The publishers are dependent on content. A lot of your peers probably do use Word. It is important to know that you can influence which way the market goes & to let them know your preferences.