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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?"
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?"
I would guess you are in the Computer field and not in a biologically oriented field. In those, Word is pretty close to the only answer and TeX is an unknown. I would say TeX is VERY restricted to the fields it is accepted in, and pretty much unknown outside of those.
Gavin Fischer
- The document format is application specific.
- Although you can use styles, few people know this, leading to unstructured documents.
- Even if you use styles, the format is still a bastard between page layout and structured layout, leading to unstructured documents.
This leads to a lot of extra work for the designer. For instance, if you use Quark, all italics have a tendency to get lost when you import the text. If you use unicode, it often gets fubar'ed. All habitual errors from the user (very few people know how to use Word properly) that Word hides because it's a bastard, show up again when you do the page layout, and have to be fixed.So why do journals insist on Word documents? Because InDesign and those other apps have to support Word in some way, and do. But don't expect that turtlenecked designer to know how to handle TeX. So yeah, we should all accept that the world revolves around Microsoft, not around sound technical decisions (or aesthetical, for that matter).
If your journal is telling you that they won't accept latex, tell them you won't submit your articles anymore, thank you very much.
In physics we have it good due to the existence of the arXiv, where we put our articles first. Therefore journals are already limited by the fact that your article is already published on the web, and they have to accept the consequences of that. e.g. they cannot have too draconian copyright terms. I know in many disciplines the situation with journals is much worse. But remember, journals are totally dependent on us, the scientists, and not the other way around. With the advent of the web and email we can diseminate our work to our colleagues and perform peer review all without the intervention of a journal.
The physics community accepts latex as the standard, and people are (rightfully) suspicious of articles which appear on the arxiv in only .doc or .pdf format.
So, I suggest you keep using latex, investigate adding a section to the arxiv for your specialty, and tell your journal that they will accept latex or be replaced.
-- Bob
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
Linguistics doesn't get the same kind of funding as the natural sciences and engineering, so no, we often don't have assistants to handle this kind of thing. Anyhow, I tried to hire a grad student to do the conversions and didn't get a single response. I guess they're better off financially than when I was a student.
Unfortunately, most of the converters will do only a subset of the markup languages & so few (if any) will work well with custom macros.
The Chikrii TeX2Word MIGHT do it. TeX4ht may also be worth a try (->HTML/XML, which can easily become other formats). Can't comment on TeXPort. Those are really your only options. If worse-comes-to-worse, you can also look fo ps/pdf->word solutions, but those are just as bad as (La)TeX->Word.
The first key to productivity is that you are comfortable in the environment. Additional keys are that it is expressive & doesn't force you through tedium & allows you to script away as much tedium as possible. Certain people ARE more comfortable with LaTeX & know it well enough (and use the right tools) such that it isn't tedious. The most tedious parts about LaTeX are not knowing how to do something (which is combatted by knowledge or good tools or good code to steal) and compilation errors (which is combatted by knowing the syntax well, by using editors that prevent/fix/point out errors, and by compiling frequently (sometimes in the background)). LaTeX is CERTAINLY more scriptable than Word & automating references & formatting can be quite trivial. An example I recently used was a solution to placing a series of dozens of figures & captions. It is easy to generate the plain text code to do this. Less easy to write a VBA script in Word. LaTeX is also more reusable & versioning CAN be better. In short, people CAN BE PRODUCTIVE in LaTeX
Products with shallow learning curves have simple interfaces. It is true that Word has an easier-to-understand GUI than many of the LaTeX GUIs. More importantly, it is (whether we like it or not) omnipresent & most administrative assistants already have some experience with (or at least knowledge of) it. Shallow learning curves do mean increased productivity for the novice. They don't translate to increased productivity for ALL users or ALL applications.
Let's see, do I want to spend 20 hours writing out all my math formulas in Word or 5 minutes using tex?
Do I really care to fiddle around making sure the figure, table, and citations are all referencd correctly in Word, or have them automatically managed in tex?
But I guess you don't use Word for any sort of real document do you?
Hohoho, children these days.
A lot of the Elsevier journals really want Word. And Elsevier publishes a rather lot of the journals out there....
Sounds like braindead management. You'd think 'scientists' would know better than to demand a closed undocumented proprietary standard for publishing something that is supposed to be open and accessible.