[XeTeX] xdv to rtf, docx, or OpenOffice?

[Jonathan Kew]

On 8 Mar 2009, at 00:46, Tara Andrews wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I'm sure this must have come up before but I can't find anything in
> the archives.
>
> I have at this point used XeLaTeX very happily for two theses and for
> critical edition typesetting in Armenian; now I am submitting various
> things to journals and finding that my non-use of Word is a much
> bigger problem in my field than I'd anticipated.  At the same time, I
> really don't want to abandon TeX for Word, especially given the dodgy
> support of the latter for many Armenian fonts and for the weird
> transcription system that we use in the field.
>
> What I really need is a way to convert my articles to .doc format, and
> to preserve the footnotes.  I know there are various solutions for
> straight LaTeX; does anything similar exist for XeLaTeX?  How
> difficult would it be for such a thing to be created?

Sorry, I don't think it's feasible. If Word's support for the fonts  
and transcription system you use is "dodgy", then the results of any  
conversion process will be equally dodgy. I'd also be surprised if it  
could handle critical-edition levels of footnoting very well.

I think one or more of the LaTeX-to-HTML routes out there can also be  
used with xelatex documents, at least to some extent, and presumably  
Word can then open the HTML and Save As its own format. But with  
material like yours, especially, the results are likely to be pretty  
rough-and-ready. I can't imagine converting such a xelatex article  
to .doc and getting anything more than a "first draft"; you'd have to  
do so much tidying-up in Word that you might as well have started  
there in the first place. (And if Word isn't up to the job for your  
writing, then how will it cope with an "imported" article any better?)

JK