[texhax] TeX to MS Word conversion

[William Adams]

On Dec 28, 2006, at 2:30 PM, Bernice Barnett wrote:

> The Adobe web site description of Acrobat 8 capabilities mentions
> translating .pdf files to MS Word. I'm curious about the quality of  
> the
> conversion if the original document was produced using typical TeX/ 
> LaTeX
> tools, e.g., PDFLaTeX or LaTeX + dvi2pdf, etc. Have any of you tried
> this capability and what did you think? I'm mostly concerned with the
> math translations, I assume that table structures and the like don't
> work very well.

Acrobat has been able to save out to a .rtf for a while now.

It's okay for capturing some simple text and formatting, but falls  
down badly beyond that.

There are a couple of commercial programs for doing this, Solid PDF,  
or the Acrobat plug-in BCL-Drake which work w/ differing degrees of  
success on different files.

Marcel Weiher's TextLightning.app is quite good if you've got access  
to Mac OS X (ob. discl. I was a beta-tester and the person who nagged  
him to include TeX-ligature reconstruction).

Unfortunately, .pdf is so bad at being a document format almost  
anything would be better as a source.

William

-- 
William Adams
senior graphic designer
Fry Communications



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