Switch conversion direction: From PC to LaTeX
last update: Nov 9, 1998
The url of this page is http://www.kfa-juelich.de/isr/1/texconv/textopc.html
Although this page resides on the official WWW server of Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH, it is NOT officially supported by Forschungszentrum Jülich but results from my personal work.
I maintain these pages because I need converters between LaTeX and PC Textprocessors for my work and I want to share the information with others who need it. They grew significantly and, because I maintain them in my spare time, I can no longer maintain a text version and a German version in parallel, as the previous version had.
This list is as good or as bad as its support, and I need YOUR support to update and supplement this list. Please supplement if you know more and/or better ones. There are some more converters on the CTAN sites, but the following seem to be most promising for conversion to and from the currect versions of wordprocessors.
Neither correctness nor completeness is guaranteed.
All opinions mentioned (if any) are my own, not my employer's. Please send
corrections, enhancements and supplements to the following address:
W.Hennings@fz-juelich.de
Note that this FAQ list contains information about converters ONLY between LaTeX and PC word processors. Converters to and from other formats may have own FAQ lists - e.g. see the link for converters to and from HTML.
There are several ways to convert. To illustrate these, let me restrict it to the Microsoft Word case:
In the previous version I dared to recommend using HTML as an intermediate format. However I got some comments saying that they had much better experience with <insert your favorite converter here>.
Moreover, the <favorite converter> of someone else didn't work at all for me, and the other way around.
So I am sorry not to have ANY recommendation now. There is no converter satisfying everyone's needs, nor working under all conditions. I am sorry again you have to try for your own.
ltx2word: LaTeX to WinWord 6, WinWord 7(95) and WinWord 97 converter, written as Word macros.
TeX2RTF : LaTeX-to-RTF converter. TeX2RTF homepage (UK site)
latex2rtf: LaTeX-to-RTF-converter
TexPort converts your TeX and LaTeX files to WordPerfect or Microsoft Word documents. KTALK's home page (USA)
There are free HTML converters for Word 6 and 7 for Windows available from
Microsoft:
Download... IA
for Word 6 /
IA for Word
7 / IA for
Word for Mac
Word 97 contains it by default, but in contrary to the previous versions it
only recognizes heading styles if they are first converted into the
corresponding html styles.
WordPerfect 7 and up have an integrated InternetPublisher.
For WordPerfect 6.1 for Windows, the InternetPublisher is available separately:
Download...
InternetPublisher
for WPWin 6.1
There also is a tool for Unix which is intended to convert word6, word7(95) and word8(97) binary files to html. See http://www.su.shuttle.de/turbo/word2html.c.gz
Because HTML is a structured format, the conversion between HTML and LaTeX is rather straightforward. However there remain the limitations of HTML compared to LaTeX, i.e. there are many elements in LaTeX which can not (yet?) be represented in HTML.
See www.w3.org for a list of converters between word processors and HTML . Or see Liste von Konvertern zwischen HTML und LaTeX (auf Deutsch).
Some converters are available from
CTAN
("Comprehensive TeX Archive Network"), e.g. in .../support/latex2html
and .../support/html2latex.
(The ... stands for a host specific base directory, which often is either
"/pub/tex" or "/tex-archive")
latex2html
(UK site): LaTeX-to-HTML converter which converts LaTeX formulae into eps
or gif graphics.
latex2html
sources (US site)
tth (US site): LaTeX-to-HTML converter which translates LaTeX formulae into HTML3.2 markup
ltoh (US site): LaTeX-to-HTML converter which is highly customizable, i.e. you can define how the LaTeX macros which are used in your document are to be translated.
Although I got an e-mail telling about ongoing work to use SGML as intermediate format for several conversions, it seems not to be ready-to-use at present.
la2mml: converts LaTeX to FrameMaker format. homepage
FrameMaker Utilities (UK site): Contains converters for both directions (LaTeX <-> FrameMaker) as well as templates which make conversion from Framemaker to LaTeX more easy
DANTE's LaTeX-PC-Konverter-Liste (auf Deutsch)
Der deutsche CTAN Server (The German CTAN server)
Deutscher CTAN Server, freie Konverter