Up to Converters from PC Textprocessors to LaTeX - Overview

TeXPerfect

last update: July 28, 1998

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From: John Forkosh <forkosh@panix.com>
Subject: New WordPerfect -> LaTeX Translater
Date: Thu, 22 Aug 1996 09:16:36 -0400 (EDT)
I recently uploaded my WordPerfect -> LaTeX translater, called TeXPerfect, to CTAN. It's available in the support directory under texperf (.../support/texperf).
(The ... stands for a host specific base directory, which often is either "/pub/tex" or "/tex-archive")
Full C source is provided, as are executables for both DOS and Linux. The 00README file in the directory provides more details. John (forkosh@panix.com)
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following extracted from the 00README file:

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Conversion functionality

Some of the LaTeX conversions performed by TeXPerfect are:
Suppose your input contains a greek alpha from the WordPerfect character set 8. The output will contain $\alpha$ instead. Most of the other special character sets provided by WordPerfect are similarly converted. (This conversion is table-driven by the data in wpchrset.h, and can be easily augmented or modified.)
Superscripts, subscripts, bold, italics, etc, are all properly interpreted and handled.
"Hard" returns in WordPerfect should generate an extra blank line, so that LaTeX will see them as paragraphs. That functionality is mostly programmed, but a last-minute difficulty prevented me from completing it. Also, no attempt is made to generate section/subsection/etc commands.
If your running text contains an expression like f(x), TeXPerfect will recognize it and surround it with $'s. A variety of other ad hoc "rules" are hand-coded into the program to decide when to enter/exit math mode. Needless to say, the decision isn't always right. You'll need to correct tp's mistakes in Step 2 above.
Equations written with WordPerfect's equation editor will be reproduced "verbatim" by TeXPerfect, surrounded by \[ and \]. The only correction applied is that 1 over 2 becomes 1 \over 2, and similarly for various other keywords. But no serious attempt to interpret and translate your equation is made. Matrices, etc, will require considerable hand-tweaking on your part. But at least you'll have what you originally wrote right in front of your eyes.
A little LaTeX preamble, etc, is provided, primarily for "cosmetic" purposes. WordPerfect's margin settings, etc, are not interpreted to construct this preamble. You'll have to modify that information yourself.

Warnings

TeXPerfect was written to interpret files formatted by WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS. When run against 5.1 files, TeXPerfect is pretty robust. But, for this release, I commented out the lines that check the version number. If you're using WP/Win, it can prepare output in 5.1 format. I'd recommend you do that before using TeXPerfect.
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